Resource Sharing in Mobile Cloud-computing with Coap

Abstract

Mobile Cloud-Computing (MCC) is a term introduced by Marc Baccue in 200920 that popularized the idea of using cloud-hosted components as a means to overcome the resource-constraints of mobile devices. But as the smartphones and tablets overcame their resource-constraints, the meaning of the term MCC changed. Nowadays MCC is mainly associated with using mobile devices to engage cloud-hosted services and to a lesser extend with combining multiple mobile devices (e.g. cloud of devices). However, as the number of users with multiple mobile devices increases there is a growing demand for enabling apps on mobile devices to share hardware and software resources. This in turn leads to questions regarding decentralized interaction, coordination and resource sharing among multiple mobile devices. This paper focusses on the “horizontal scalability” of apps e.g. the ability to combine multiple mobile devices (executing the same mobile app) into a single compute environment that utilizes all available hardware and software resources in a decentralized manner. One possible approach to achieve this is by designing mobile apps as sets of RESTful micro-services and to allow these services to communicate via low-bandwidth IoT communication protocols. This paper presents the results of our performance evaluations using RESTful micro-services on mobile devices that communicate via the IoT protocol CoAP in different WIFI environments.