Introduction to Mobile-Cloud Computing

What is Mobile Cloud Computing? an infrastructure where both the data storage and processing happen outside of the mobile device. moves the computing power and data storage away from the mobile into the cloud, which is accessed over the wireless connection based on a thin native client

Why Mobile Cloud Computing? Mobile devices face many resource challenges Allowing infrastructure, platforms and software by cloud providers at low cost and elastically in an on-demand fashion. the need to have a powerful device configuration.

MCC Architecture

Advantages of MCC Extending battery lifetime: – Computation offloading migrates large computations and complex processing from resource-limited devices (i.e., mobile devices) to resourceful machines (i.e., servers in clouds). – Remote application execution can save energy significantly. – Many mobile applications take advantages from task migration and remote processing.

Advantages of MCC Improving data storage capacity and processing power: – MCC enables mobile users to store/access large data on the cloud. – MCC helps reduce the running cost for computation intensive applications. – Mobile applications are not constrained by storage capacity on the devices because their data now is stored on the cloud.

Advantages of MCC Improving reliability and availability: – Keeping data and application in the clouds reduces the chance of lost on the mobile devices. – MCC can be designed as a comprehensive data security model for both service providers and users: – With data and services in the clouds, then are always available even when the users are moving.

Advantages of MCC Dynamic provisioning: – Dynamic on-demand provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis – No need for advanced reservation Scalability: – Mobile applications can be performed and scaled to meet the unpredictable user demands – Service providers can easily add and expand a service

Advantages of MCC Multi-tenancy: – Service providers can share the resources and costs to support a variety of applications and large no. of users. Ease of Integration: – Multiple services from different providers can be integrated easily through the cloud and the Internet to meet the users’ demands.

MCC Applications Mobile Commerce Mobile learning Mobile Healthcare Mobile Gaming

key questions How does mobile cloud computing differ from cloud computing? What approaches have been made towards mobile cloud computing and how do they differ from each other? How can computation be offloaded and distributed to the cloud efficiently and in which ways does this differ from traditional distributed computing?

key questions What incentives can be used to persuade surrounding surrogate devices to participate in sharing the workload? How can context information be used in a beneficial way? How does mobility affect the performance of a mobile cloud?

Crowd computing Fortunately, a police officer sends out an alert via text message to all mobile phones within a two mile radius, requesting them to upload all photographs they have taken in the parade during the past hour, to a server that only the police has access to.

Crowd computing Since most mobile phones are equipped with sensors today, readings from sensors such as GPS, accelerometer, light sensor, microphone, thermometer, clock, and compass can be timestamped and linked with other phone readings.

Crowd computing Queries can then be executed on such data to gather valuable information. Such queries could be ‘‘What is the average temperature of nodes within a mile of my location?’’ or ‘‘what is the distribution of velocities of all nodes within half a mile of the next highway on my current route?’’ Sample applications for this are traffic reporting, sensor maps, and network availability monitoring.

Method of Overloading Current research discusses offloading methods in three main directions; Client–Server Communication methods, Virtualization, and Mobile agents.

a mobile agent is a process that can transport its state from one environment to another, with its data intact, and be capable of performing appropriately in the new environment.

Client–Server Communication Communication is done across the mobile device ( offloader) and surrogate device via protocols such as Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) and Sockets. Both RPC and RMI have well supported APIs and are considered stable by developers.

Client–Server Communication offloading means that services need to have been pre- installed in the participating devices. This is a disadvantage when considering the ad hoc and mobile nature of a mobile cloud and restricts the mobility of users if in the vicinity of devices that do not support the needed services.

A cost–benefit analysis is essential to weigh the benefits of offloading against the potential gain by evaluating the predicted cost of execution with user specific requirements as illustrated in Figure below.