Cloud-based Mobile Applications Research Articles

OneWorldGiving : Uniting NGO’s and Donors for a Better World

"OneWorldGiving: Uniting NGOs and donors for a Better World" is a project aiming to bridge the gap between donors and NGOs in India's philanthropic scene. The initiative aims to create a platform that promotes efficiency, transparency, and cooperation, fostering shared responsibility and trust among all parties involved. Other studies have focused on cloud-based mobile applications, automation of donation procedures using Azure Logic Apps, Android app for receiving food, clothing, and book contributions, and mobile applications for community projects and NGOs. However, challenges such as platform-specific specifications, outdated devices, and specialist knowledge in Flutter programming may arise. The NGO Portal website aims to help NGOs and potential volunteers interact, promoting a sense of community and unity among stakeholders. The Android application focuses on making book contributions to NGOs easier, with a Donation Registration component, Firebase database, and User Management feature. The project aims to create a transformative platform that promotes cooperation, openness, and group compassion, improving lives for those in need.

A Cloud-Based Mobile Application for Cashless Payments to Enhance Transportation Mobility in India

A Cloud-Based Mobile Application for Cashless Payments to Enhance Transportation Mobility in India

Who needs code anyway? [skills -data upskilling

Platforms which allow lay users to create apps, process data and even perform machine learning with minimal or no code are on the rise. Can they plug the digital skills gap? Low-code and no-code platforms offer a lot of productivity gains and help digitise and automate processes with cloud-based mobile applications.

Digital Training and Advanced Learning in Occupational Safety and Health Based on Modern and Affordable Technologies

Occupational safety and health (OSH) is a very important issue for both practical purposes in industry and business due to numerous reasons, so a number of software, educational and industrial solutions are available. In this paper, the cloud-based mobile application for digital training and advanced learning in the field of occupational safety was presented. The proposed framework architecture was based on a novel approach: Node.JS for the server backend and the React Native for the front-end development; while MongoDB was used for implementing the cloud data storage using sensors that are all available on the Android platform. In the development of this application, a number of options were developed (using open-source software) such as the reading of a QR code, usage of built-in sensors within android platforms, reporting, and voice messages. The developed SafeST solution is presented through a real industry example. It emphasizes two main possibilities of the solution, improving OHS reporting and significant empowerment of the students in the OHS field based on the learning-by-doing approach. In this way, the additional engagement (identification, recording and reporting of UA/UC) of OSH managers has been reduced to a minimum, taking into account requested reports from management and authorities, and the continual training of the employees and preparation of the students for future working activities. The system was tested for educational purposes with the initial idea to develop an application for smartphones which could be useful and well adopted among engineering students in the OSH field.

Enhanced Forensic Process for Improving Mobile Cloud Traceability in Cloud-Based Mobile Applications

Recently, the raPID popularity of smart phones significantly impacts the day-to-day activities of humans due to the increased access to social media and instant messaging services. The misuse of social media services leads to different cybercrime activities. Both the mobile device and cloud are the most significant evidential sources for the social network application forensics. It is essential to establish a mobile cloud forensic process to deal with the crime activities performed by the intelligent mobile user. Also, improving the cloud event traceability is a challenging task in a massive cloud environment. This work presents a mobile cloud forensic process that incorporates the time synchronization and inter and intra-application analysis along with the traditional forensic procedure. Time synchronization is a prerequisite process that facilitates the investigator to perform the application forensics in the mobile cloud concisely. An inter and intra-application analysis process ensures the extraction of the forensic-rich evidence and enriches the performance of the cloud event traceability by utilizing the metadata of potential mobile evidence. The proposed forensic process maintains a chronological timeline of evidence before correlating the potential evidence of the mobile and cloud. Eventually, it submits the extracted evidence with a chain of custody information to validate the forensic investigation process. It significantly enhances the accuracy of the investigation and produces evidence by applying the step by step process in the Android WeChat social network application.

IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Emerging Trends, Issues, and Challanges in Energy-Efficient Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is one of the most successful business models for providing a simple pay-as-you-go, and therefore is gaining much popularity in the industry. Customers and enterprises can maintain or scale-up a business easily while cutting down on their budget. However, energy consumption is one of the biggest problems in current cloud computing. It is both essential and urgent for governmental and industrial institutions to address this, to achieve rapid growth. The development of energy-efficient cloud computing has to be taken into consideration, which relies on the development of several key technologies: More energy-efficient mediums can be used in cloud computing at the platform level; energy-efficient scheduling algorithms, memory systems, storage systems, resource management policies, etc., can be adopted at the hypervisor level; energy-efficient scheduling, communications, and applications can be applied at the virtual machine level; and energy-efficient mobile cloud computing will be developed, involving green networking and wireless communications, cloud-based mobile applications, and limited resources management.

A SYSTEMATIC MAPPING STUDY ON CLOUD-BASED MOBILE APPLICATION TESTING

Mobile applications and devices have played a significant role in boosting global businesses that encompass various domains such as health, education, banking, and transportation. These tools have become indispensable for everyday activities, and its applications have been developing rapidly with diverse features and platforms. However, this has created new problems and security challenges. To ensure the quality and security of these applications, a rigorous and systematic testing using cloud-based environment is required. By employing systematic mapping study (SMS) method, this paper will examine the empirical studies that address the issues on cloud-based mobile application testing. This paper presents a total of 23 primary studies that investigate cloud based mobile application testing and the effect of Testing as a Service (TaaS). The majority of these studies (56.5%) contribute to literature with a number of framework proposals. A large proportion of the studies (60.9%) analyzed Android applications, and usually supported a single type of mobile app testing. Other than that, the majority of the studies (52.2%) have failed to investigate the outcomes of TaaS, despite a plethora of services that offers TaaS. The SMS method conducted in this paper has identified gaps in literature, which are: 1) there is a lack of general and scalable approaches to support the diverse types of mobile app testing for applications using various platforms, and 2) the lack of evaluation methods such as case study to validate the proposed approaches.

Process state synchronization-based application execution management for mobile edge/cloud computing

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) and mobile edge computing (MEC) facilitate the mobile devices to augment their capabilities by utilizing the resources and services offered by Cloud and Edge Cloud, respectively. However, due to mobility, network connection becomes unstable that causes application execution disruption. Such disruption increases the execution time and in some cases restrain the mobile devices from getting execution results from the cloud. This research work analyzes the impact of user mobility on the execution of cloud-based mobile applications. We propose a Process State Synchronization (PSS)-based execution management to solve the aforementioned problem. We analytically compute a sufficient condition on synchronization interval that ensure reduction in mobile application execution time under PSS in case of disconnection. Similarly, we compute the upper bound on synchronization interval whereby a larger synchronization interval did not result in significant benefits in terms of execution time for the mobile application. The analytical results were confirmed by the sample implementation of PSS with the computed synchronization intervals. Moreover, we also compare the performance of proposed solution with the state-of-the-art solutions. The results show that the PSS-based execution outperforms the other contemporary solutions.

Integrated Development of Health Promotion Cloud-based Mobile Platform and Application in New Taipei City

Integrated Development of Health Promotion Cloud-based Mobile Platform and Application in New Taipei City

Context-aware adaptive resource provisioning for mobile clients in intra-cloud environment

Mobile cloud computing is an emerging cloud service model as they provide on-demand resources for cloud-based mobile applications and services. One of the critical research issues is the efficient handling of the mobile client requests considering the inconsistent nature, such as limited battery life, disconnection, and mobility. We propose an efficient resource provisioning model, context-aware adaptive resource provisioning (CAARP) that considers the client current context information to meet the user specified performance requirements. The model employs queuing theory to estimate the system performance for each request, allowing the service provider to dynamically provision resources. Simulation results establish the correctness of the proposed algorithm. The results show that with the proposed model we can save a significant amount of service time and achieve a better quality of service compared to other states of art schemes.

Development of Mobile Cloud Applications using UML

With the proliferation of cloud computing technologies, smartphone users are able to use a variety of cloud computing-based mobile services such as games, education, entertainment, and social networking. Despite the popularity of such a mobile cloud computing, the complicated multi-tier system configuration of the mobile application must be one of the major impediments to develop mobile cloud applications. This paper presents development processes and procedures for developing mobile cloud applications by effectively applying Unified Modeling Language (UML), a representative object-oriented modeling language. The paper is intended to enhance the development productivity of the mobile cloud application and to improve the effectiveness of communication between software developers. In addition, we used the Android mobile platform and Amazon Web Service for cloud computing in order to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach to systematically apply the UML profiles and diagrams for cloud-based mobile applications.

Smart Campus: An Implementation of a Cloud-Based Mobile Learning Application

A cloud-based mobile learning application allows access to learning resources stored in the cloud. The limitations of the traditional mobile learning such as insufficient storage, limited power have made mobile learning applications inefficient, hence the need to integrate mobile learning with cloud computing. This paper focuses on providing a smart platform where instructors or lecturers can upload learning resources to the cloud, and learners can access these resources with their mobile devices, after they have been successfully uploaded. Also the concepts, technologies, and tools used for the implementation were also discussed.

Context-aware Cloud-based Mobile Application for Assessment and Training of Visual Cognitive Abilities

<p class="0abstract">Context-aware mobile applications can adapt to different mobile, user and application contexts. Mobile cloud computing has been integrated with those applications to benefit from the cloud resources and make up for the limited mobile resources. This paper proposes such an application for the assessment and training of student visual cognitive abilities and skills that constitute an integral part of student intelligence such as the visualization ability of recognizing rotated objects. The need to ubiquitously and continuously deliver exercises relevant to a specific visual cognitive ability or skill according to the student proficiency and context has stimulated proposing the context-aware cloud-based MObile application for assessment and training of visual Cognitive Abilities (MOCA) presented in this paper. Integrating cloud computing with MOCA allows creating an extendible repository on the cloud and saving the relatively limited mobile resources that would be consumed by visual material. MOCA can be used in applications that are based on such cognitive abilities such as teaching visual science concepts and the visual classification and diagnosis of medical images. Two prototype mobile applications have been developed based on MOCA for visualization ability and for visual classification of science concepts. Empirical evaluation has shown the effectiveness of MOCA in training the students and the satisfaction of the students and teachers with its capabilities. MOCA is also a framework for building systems for other types of cognitive abilities.</p>

English

English

Efficient Load-Balancing Aware Cloud Resource Scheduling for Mobile User

The paper proposes an efficient load-balancing aware cloud resource scheduling approach for mobile users. The proposed approach augments local cloud service pools with public cloud to increase the probability of meeting the service level agreements. The proposed problem is divided by public cloud service scheduling and local cloud service scheduling. The system status information is used in the hybrid mobile cloud system such as the preferences of mobile applications, energy, server load in cloud data center to improve resource utilization and quality of experience of mobile user. Therefore, the system status of hybrid mobile cloud is monitored continuously. The mathematical model of the system and optimization problem is given. An example for hybrid cloud-based mobile multimedia application is also presented. Through extensive experiments, the paper evaluates our algorithm and other approaches from the literature under different conditions. The results of the experiments show our approach has better performance than the approaches from the literature.

Edge-Aware Label Propagation for Mobile Facial Enhancement on the Cloud

This paper proposes a facial enhancement framework with mask generation for cloud-based mobile applications. We mathematically analyze and unify the mask generation, as well as the state-of-the-art region-aware mask and edit propagation techniques, from a graph-based semisupervised learning perspective. Then we propose a label propagation model with a new edge-aware structure and guided feature for mask generation. The limit analysis of the model leads to a fast algorithm, which reduces the intrinsic computation cost. Then we develop a flexible and efficient cloud-based PaaS system, called FaceMore, for intelligent mobile face enhancement. The flexibility and extendibility of the cloud-based architecture facilitates intelligent facial enhancement applications and the parallel processing effectively improves the efficiency of the algorithm. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations were performed for mask propagation and face enhancement. Comparisons with the previous methods and five representative commercial systems, including PicTreat, Portraiture, Portrait+, Meitu, and Baidu Motu, illustrate the robustness and effectiveness of our method.

Web Service Discovery for Cloud-Based Mobile Application Using Multi-Level Clustering and QoS-Based Ranking

Since many service providers are providing similar web services, finding an accurate web service based on user preferences is becoming a challenging task. Therefore, enhancing web service discovery (WSD) method will improve the searching performance. In this paper, we firstly discuss and review some existing web service discovery approaches and identify their limitations. Subsequently, we propose a web service discovery method for cloud-based mobile application by using multi-level clustering technique to improve performance by reducing the searching scope. Our web service discovery architecture is able to increase the discoverability of more accurate web services based on user's preferences. Meanwhile, user preference Quality of Services (QoS) attributes are also used for ranking procedure to allow user to decide the quality of the mobile application. The experimental results show that our approach is able to increase the searching performance and provide a reliable list of selection for users.

Editorial: Software Engineering and Applications for Cloud-Based Mobile Systems

Presents an editorial which explores the market fr cloud-based mobile computing systems. The concept of cloud-based mobile applications has emerged recently to address the limitations of pure mobile applications by leveraging the vast resources available at computing clouds. Traditionally, mobile applications benefit by outsourcing a part of the program execution to a cloud-based system to compute the (intermediate) results and send back these results for integration by the relevant mobile application. By doing so, the program code, data as well as device-specific information, such as user locations, can be made available to a cloud. Infrastructures to support computation outsourcing of the above type and its variants have been widely studied; and the associated security and privacy issues are hot topics in research.

IBM Bluemix Mobile Cloud Services

The Mobile Cloud Services offering of IBM Bluemix® is a platform for cloud-based mobile applications, providing data and file storage, application authentication, push notifications, and server-side application logic, all available through easy-to-use client software development kits (SDKs). In this paper, we describe the server-side architecture for the key components of the Mobile Cloud Services. For scalability and fault resilience, components are implemented as stateless services that communicate using a distributed message queue. We adopted a “design for failure” approach to all environmental services, including basic networking support. We developed a robust communications layer that adds timeout and retry logic to all external interactions. We also built a flexible and robust application-monitoring infrastructure to constantly probe the service components, test end-to-end functionality, and report any problems through web monitors and text messages. Finally, we designed and delivered client SDKs for Android®, iOS®, and JavaScript® that enable application developers to quickly create robust mobile applications that utilize IBM Mobile Cloud Services. These architecture and implementation choices have resulted in a robust and scalable cloud-based platform for mobile application developers.

Network-centric performance analysis of runtime application migration in mobile cloud computing

Mobile cloud computing alleviates the limitations of resource-constrained mobile devices by leveraging the cloud resources. Currently, software-level solutions, also known as computational offloading, migrate the cloud-based mobile applications at runtime to the cloud datacenter to optimize the application execution time. However, the application execution frameworks mainly focus on migrating the application without considering the various critical network-centric parameters, such as traffic load and mobility speed, in application migration decision. In this paper, we analyze the effect of network-centric parameters on the application migration process. The performance of the migration process is analyzed by simulating the migration process in OMNeT++. The effects of various parameters, such as number of users in a WLAN, size of a file containing the application and its running states, traffic load on the wireless access point, message length, number of hops to the cloud, and mobility speed, are studied on the application performance metrics such as application migration time and packet drop ratio. Our analysis shows that the application and its running states migration time is affected by the changes in the network conditions. Based on our research findings, we recommend application execution framework designers to incorporate the network-centric parameters along with other parameters in the decision process of the application migration.