Qinglan Peng, Yunni Xia*, MengChu Zhou, Xin Luo, Shu Wang, Yuandou Wang, Chunrong Wu, Shanchen Pang, Mingwei Lin. (*Corresponding author)

IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering

An opportunistic link between two mobile devices or nodes can be constructed when they are within each other’s communication range. Typically, cyber–physical environments consist of a number of mobile devices that are potentially able to establish opportunistic contacts and serve mobile applications in a cost-effective way. Opportunistic mobile service computing is a promising paradigm capable of utilizing the pervasive mobile computational resources around the users. Mobile users are thus allowed to exploit nearby mobile services to boost their computing capabilities without investment in their resource pool. Nevertheless, various challenges, especially its quality-of-service and reliability-aware scheduling, are yet to be addressed. Existing studies and related scheduling strategies consider mobile users to be fully stable and available. In this article, we propose a novel method for reliability-aware and deadline-constrained service composition over opportunistic networks. We leverage the Krill–Herd-based algorithm to yield a deadline-constrained, reliability-aware, and well-executable service composition schedule based on the estimation of completion time and reliability of schedule candidates. We carry out extensive case studies based on some well-known mobile service composition templates and a real-world opportunistic contact data set. The comparison results suggest that the proposed approach outperforms existing ones in terms of success rate and completion time of composed services.