Mobile Cloud Computing

Mohammad A Ibrahim

Davenport University

August 15, 2012

Cloud Computing

Introduction

Cloud computing for mobile world or, rather, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is a well accepted concept that aims at using cloud computing techniques for storage and processing of data on mobile devices, thereby reducing their limitations. According to ABI Research , “By 2015, more than 240 million business customers will be leveraging cloud computing services through mobile devices, driving revenues of $5.2 billion”. While it must be noted that there were only 42.8 million Mobile Cloud Computing subscribers in 2008. This underlines the importance of cloud computing for mobile. The end mobile device user will eventually be the benefactor of the Mobile Cloud Computing. Company users can share resources and applications without a high level of capital expenditure on hardware and software resources.

Nature of cloud applications also is advantageous for users since they do not need to have very technical hardware to run applications as these computing operations are run within the cloud. This reduces the price of mobile computing to the end users. They could see a huge number of new features enhancing their phones due to Mobile Cloud Computing. At the same time the developers also have real advantages from Mobile Cloud Computing. The largest bene?t of cloud computing for developers is access to a broader audience of a wide range of mobile subscribers. Since cloud computing applications go through a browser, the end user's mobile operating system does not have any impact on the application.

Along with the plethora of bene?t, there are a large number of issues to be addressed and unsolved problems to be solved. Several challenges such as the dependency on continuous network connections, data sharing applications and collaboration, and security Another key challenge for Mobile Cloud Computing is network availability and intermittency. Also Mobile Cloud Computing concepts rely on an always-on connectivity and will need to provide a scalable and high quality mobile access. The rest of this thesis is organized as follows. Section II gives an introduction to Mobile Cloud Computing; Section III refers to the issues and possible solutions pertaining to Mobile.

Novel Application Models for Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile cloud computing could be described as the availability of cloud computing services in a mobile ecosystem, i.e. worldwide distributed storage system, exceed traditional mobile device capabilities, and offload processing, storage and security. To leverage the full potential of mobile cloud computing we need to consider the capabilities and constraints of existing architectures. Augmented Execution Augmented execution refers to a technique used to overcome the limitations of smart phones in terms of computation, memory and battery. Chun and Maniatis propose architecture that addresses these challenges via seamlessly offloading execution from the phone to computational infrastructure (cloud) where cloned replica of the Smartphone's software is running.

The mobile phone hosts its computation and memory demanding applications. However, some or all of the tasks are offloaded in the cloud where a cloned system image of the device is running. The results from the augmented execution are reintegrated ...