Container-Based Customization Approach for Mobile Environments on Clouds

Abstract

Recently, mobile cloud which utilizes the elastic resources of clouds to provide services for mobile applications, is becoming more and more popular. When building a mobile cloud platform (MCP), one of the most important things is to provide an execution environment for mobile applications, e.g., the Android mobile operating system (OS). Many efforts have been made to build Android environments on clouds, such as Android virtual machines (VMs) and Android containers. However, the need of customizable Android execution environments for MCP has been ignored for many years, since the existing OS customization solutions are only designed for hardware-specific platforms or driver-specific applications, and taking little account of frequently-changing scenarios on clouds. Moreover, they lack a unified method of customization, as well as an effective upgrade and maintenance mechanism. As a result, they are not suitable for varied and large-scale scenarios on clouds. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a unified and effective approach for customizing Android environments on clouds. The approach provides a container-based solution to custom-tailor Android OS components, as well as a way to run Android applications for different scenarios. Under the guidance of this approach, we develop an automatic customization toolkit named AndroidKit for generating specific Android OS components. Through this toolkit, we are able to boot new Android VM instances called AndroidXs. These AndroidXs are composed of OS images generated by AndroidKit, which can be easily customized and combined for varied demands on clouds.