An Improved Approach of Decoupling in Mobile Cloud Computing

Abstract

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) augments resource capability of mobile/portable devices for efficient execution of their applications, which results in undesirable coupling of mobile applications and mobile cloud services. The existing approaches of decoupling between them can manage either logical mobility or physical mobility of different constituents of MCC, but not together at the same time. This paper proposes the notion of hierarchical decoupling in MCC, that manages both logical and physical mobility simultaneously. The proposed hierarchical decoupling follows a tiered approach, in which interactions of mobile applications with mobile cloud services are decoupled at two tiers using the tuple space model. At the top tier, decoupling manages logical mobility of mobile applications and mobile cloud services, whereas, decoupling at the bottom tier handles physical mobility of devices in dynamic and unreliable networks. This results in better decoupling between mobile applications and mobile cloud services, which, in turn, improves adaptability and robustness of MCC. A new mobile cloud architecture that realizes the proposed approach has also been presented in this paper.