Objective
The objective of the proposed joint exchange project is thus to provide a stimulating and structured platform for the exchange of researchers and for the joint development of innovative ideas in the emerging areas within mobile cloud computing (and beyond).
Overview
Mobile cloud computing combines cloud and mobile computing techniques to enable pervasive information access for mobile users via smart phones, which has become a significant research topic in the past years. Due to the heterogeneity of network environments and the limited resource of mobile devices, service provisioning encounters several challenges. First, portable devices are restricted by their battery lifetime, computational and storage capacity, which prevents them from performing complicated tasks and deploying content-rich or computation-intensive applications. Second, portable devices are operated on heterogeneous wireless networks, which cause the unevenness of network bandwidth capacity and communication quality; device mobility further affects the network connectivity and cloud resource availability. Third, the mobile cloud computing platform needs to manage virtualized resources accessed by a large number of mobile devices in a flexible way, and leverage the workload of mobile applications by providing remote processing and storage support. To tackle these challenges, we target to provide an integrated framework for enabling energy-efficient reliable mobile cloud services. We envision that mobile users would access cloud service ubiquitously without caring about where a service is actually hosted, while service providers may dynamically request virtualized resources for content-oriented or compute-intensive services. To mitigate the needs of mobile devices in computing capacity and resources, the mobile cloud computing paradigm allows the computing, data storage and mass information processing be offloaded to the cloud platform for enhancing the reliability and availability of services while minimizing the energy and computational requirements in mobile devices. This project studies the architecture and mechanisms of mobile cloud computing through complimentary knowledge and research exchange between China and Europe.
