Mobile Distributed File System Research Articles

Hadoop MapReduce for Mobile Clouds

The new generations of mobile devices have high processing power and storage, but they lag behind in terms of software systems for big data storage and processing. Hadoop is a scalable platform that provides distributed storage and computational capabilities on clusters of commodity hardware. Building Hadoop on a mobile network enables the devices to run data intensive computing applications without direct knowledge of underlying distributed systems complexities. However, these applications have severe energy and reliability constraints (e.g., caused by unexpected device failures or topology changes in a dynamic network). As mobile devices are more susceptible to unauthorized access, when compared to traditional servers, security is also a concern for sensitive data. Hence, it is paramount to consider reliability, energy efficiency and security for such applications. The MDFS (Mobile Distributed File System) [1] addresses these issues for big data processing in mobile clouds. We have developed the Hadoop MapReduce framework over MDFS and have studied its performance by varying input workloads in a real heterogeneous mobile cluster. Our evaluation shows that the implementation addresses all constraints in processing large amounts of data in mobile clouds. Thus, our system is a viable solution to meet the growing demands of data processing in a mobile environment.

PUM applications and VMDFS file structure: amortised analysis and evaluation

The high-end mobile devices, equipped with 3G and higher mobile communication interfaces, have established the ubiquitous computing platform to support a set of mobile applications. The personalised ubiquitous multimedia (PUM) is a promising class of ubiquitous multimedia applications. The PUM applications advocate access to multimedia contents anytime and anywhere needing support from the specialised file systems. The existing distributed and mobile file systems are not adequately suitable to support such applications handling the challenges offered by mobile computing paradigm. This paper briefly introduces the environments of PUM applications along with the file system structure of virtual memory based mobile distributed file system (VMDFS) in view of supporting the PUM applications. The amortised analysis of the VMDFS implementation models is described in mathematical constructs considering the combinations of different pre-fetch models and network models. A set of properties regarding the VMDFS performance is hypothesised through the analysis. The experimental evaluations of VMDFS implementation models validate the hypothesised properties.

Towards building a conflict‐free mobile distributed file system

AbstractThe rising demand for mobile computing has created a need for an improved file system that supports mobile clients. Current file systems with support for mobility provide availability through file replicas that are cached at the client side. However, mobile clients may experience different obstacles with regards to the local cache, such as the limited network bandwidth, the intermittent connection, and serious conflicts when synchronizing back to the server. In this paper, we propose a novel mobile distributed file system design, which provides high availability and reliable storage for files and guarantees that file operations are executed regardless of concurrency and failure issues. The design is intended to fit mobile clients (e.g. PDAs and cell phones) that have limited storage space and cannot store all of the data they need, and yet require access to these data at all times. We adopt a server‐side caching in order to guarantee sufficient caching space to all mobile clients, and to ensure the availability of files in the case of clients' failures. We present our algorithm, describe its implementation, simulate its high availability functions, and report on its performance evaluation using a cluster of workstations. Our simulation results indicate clearly that our algorithm exhibits a significant degree of automation and conflict‐free mobile file system. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.