Resource Management in Mobile Cloud Computing

Abstract

Mobile cloud computing is a major research topic in Information Technology & Communications. It integrates cloud computing, mobile computing and wireless networks. While mainly built on cloud computing, it has to operate using more heterogeneous resources with implications on how these resources are managed and used. Managing the resources of a mobile cloud is not a trivial task, involving vastly different architectures. The process is outside the scope of human users. Using the resources by the applications at both platform and software tiers come with its own challenges. This paper presents different approaches in use for managing cloud resources at infrastructure and platform levels.Keywords: Cloud Computing, Mobile Cloud Computing, Resource Management1 IntroductionInternational Telecommunication Union (ITU) predicts a mobile-broadband penetration rate at worldwide-level of 32% by the end of 2014. It is double the rate of the previous year and almost four times as much as five years ago. There is a huge gap between developed countries and developing countries, with a penetration rate of 84% for the former and 21% for the latter. Mobile-broadband is the highest growing market segment with an estimated 2.3 billion subscriptions by the end of 2014. At the same time, mobile-cellular subscriptions approach market saturation, at a level 7 billion subscriptions [1].Of much more importance for mobile cloud computing, as both consumers and providers of cloud resources, are the 1 billion smartphones in use (2nd quarter, 2012), with a globally penetration rate of 16.7% [2]. It is estimated that in just three years (by 2015/2016) their number will reach 2 billion. The estimation for 2018 is for a 3.3 billion level. Another potentially mobile computing clients are the tablets, with sales 270 million units just in 2014.In a short period of time, the Internet and mobile devices have become an integral part of the daily life, in developed world as well as in the developing countries [3]. A Nielsen study shows that in the United States of America, monthly usage of the Internet by adult people splits in 34 hours from mobile devices opposed with 27 hours from desktop computers. Moreover, from the associated network traffic, only 14% is owed to web usage, the rest of 86% being generated by mobile applications [4].One of the hottest research topics is Internet of Things (IoT). Smartphones, tablets and mobile terminals make a large part of the interconnected devices, but mobility comes with restrictions on physical dimensions, computing power, battery autonomy and power use. As the world goes mobile, the existence of these hard limits gets in direct conflict with the users' expectations and needs of a constant and predictable performance increase for all computing devices. On the mobile end, users requires more processing power and more autonomy. On the other hand, the infrastructure required to support the mobile services keeps expanding and its energy use develops with it. The small increases in energy efficiency did little to alleviate the constant grow in global power usage.The shift to mobile was shown to be accompanied by problems such as insufficient resources, limited battery capacity and limits in network connectivity [5]. Decreasing applications' response time, efficient batter use of battery power and available network bandwidth are the main challenges for the future of mobile applications.Mobile cloud computing is a solution for overcoming the barriers encountered by the rapid expanse of mobile use. Mobile cloud computing resides at the intersection of mobile computing and cloud computing. It is a major research topic for Information Technology and Communications (IT&C), shifting the point of use of computing resource from the end consumer to the resource reach data centers.2 Cloud ComputingCloud computing is defined by National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) as a model which allows remote ondemand access to shared pool of computing resources (networks, servers, storage, application and services). …