Mobile Cloud Computing

Summary

The Mobile Cloud Computing project looks at architectures and protocols of next generation infrastructures that exploit the synergy between Mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and Cloud Computing. It develops answers to how to enable new classes of CPU-intensive, and data-intensive, applications for mobile devices and how to process large number of real-time concurrent interactive data streams emerging from the IoT environment. Research areas of interest include formal methods, Operating Systems, Virtualization, and IP-based and Information Centric Networking protocol stacks for resource-constrained environments. Undergoing efforts are summarized below.

Description

Design robustness using formal language 

This effort develops a formal specification using the π-calculus to define a virtual device representation. It also describes a way to compose multiple virtual devices representing physical devices available on the network to build a composite virtual device.  During this process we address the offloading of applications running on virtual devices to local clouds (Cloulets). The proposed 3-tiered (Mobile device, Cloudlet, and Public Cloud) architecture develops a framework to integrate them and case studies to show the structural congruence between a locally executed application and an offloaded version of the same application.

Continuous Monitoring  

This effort builds on the previous architecture to add continuous performance monitoring from the device perspective. The focus is on collecting data that will supply additional information to improve the performance this dynamic, distributed and real-time nature of the architecture. 

Protocol for the Interoperability 

The application offloading concern is a complex problem which contains communication, application isolation, and persistence layers. We focus on the first layer – Mobile Offloading Communication Protocol (MOCP). This is a communication protocol between the cloudlet which plays the server role and the mobile application manager which plays the client role. The manager pilots the whole life cycle of the mobile application on the mobile device. An Application Program Interface (API) is built on top of Representational State Transfer (REST) that enables the automatic generation of MOCP’s skeletons for servers and mobile devices in multiple programming languages such as Java, C++ and JavaScript.
 

Major Accomplishments

• Definition of the Mobile Cloud architecture using formal methods
• Test method for the robustness of the offloading using the structural congruence
• Device virtualization and composition for both mobile devices and IoT devices
• Performance monitoring for the Mobile Cloud 
• Mobile Offloading Communication Protocol (MOCP)

Associated Product(s)

Publications:

• Towards a Formal Definition of the Mobile Cloud
• Monitoring Architecture for Cloudlet-Based Mobile Cloud Computing