An OSGi-based flexible and adaptive pervasive cloud infrastructure

Abstract

There is a trend that different computing paradigms such as cloud computing, pervasive, and mobile computing are converging with each other. Due to this convergence, there arise unprecedented complexities, such as huge number of computing devices, flexibilities and adaptation of service infrastructure (infrastructure elasticity) for fitting dynamics of large smart city applications, expectations of powerful computing and storage capabilities on handhold devices, and so on. Therefore, a supporting infrastructure is needed, which can flexibly switch services at run time and can be used to enhance capabilities for small devices through component/service migrations. In this paper, we propose an elastic open service gateway initiative (OSGi)-based pervasive cloud (OSGi-PC) infrastructure which can make use of both the cloud computing capabilities and the component flexibilities from OSGi. OSGi-PC provides flexible management of component migrations between small devices themselves and powerful nodes in between, which is remaining a critical challenge for enabling mobile clouds. We have evaluated the OSGi-PC in terms of performance for adaptive service provision, and power consumption during service adaptation, performance and power consumption for component migrations in different scenarios, which show the usability of OSGi-PC.