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Resilience Mobile Cloud Computing: Features,

Applications and Challenges

Conference Paper · October 2015

DOI: 10.1109/ECONF.2015.59

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 2015 Fifth International Conference on e-Learning

Resilience Mobile Cloud Computing: Features, Applications and

Challenges

Lo’ai Tawalbeh1, Norah Alassaf1, Waseem Bakheder1, Alaa Tawalbeh2

1 2
Computer Engineering Department, Physics Department, Faculty of Science
Umm Al-Qura University, Al-Balqa’ Applied University,
Makkah, Saudi Arabia Jordan
latawalbeh@uqu.edu.sa, Noura.alassaf@hotmail.com, Alaaali8380@gmail.com
Eng.waseem.b@hotmail.com

an example, multimedia applications that require high

Abstract- Mobile Cloud Computing is a very important trend processing capabilities are executed on the cloud systems and
nowadays. It merges the cloud computing technologies with the final results are returned back to the mobile device.
mobile devices to overcome the limitations of these devices such Additionally, MCC inherits some advantages of clouds such as
as limited battery life time, limited processing and storage scalability and support multi users and the integration of
capabilities. The tasks that need massive computations can be security services such as confidentiality and integrity [3].
performed on the cloud efficiently and the results will be sent
back to the mobile device, this way, the mobile battery and There are three basic components in Mobile Cloud
resources will be saved. This Paper presents overview of Mobile Computing: mobile device, wireless communication channel
Cloud Computing and efficient architectures and applications.
and cloud as illustrated in figure1. [4]. The mobile device is a
Also, we will present several important features and challenges
for mobile cloud computing systems including resilience, security, resource constrained and have many different hardware
scalability and availability. manufacturers, storage devices, and operating systems which
might create compatibility issues at integration that might
Keywords— Mobile systems applications; cloud computing;
cause system unavailability. Achieving availability by storing
cloudlet; efficiency; security; resilience.
and backing up the users data on the cloud servers. This will
I. INTRODUCTION reduce the data loss chances and avoids a single point of failure
[5].
The mobile devices plays major role in our daily life. We Wireless communication channel has several radio access
continuously use our smart phone and tablets during the day technologies such as 3G, WLAN, GPRS and WiMax, and each
and night. A survey showed that a normal person checks his one has its network configurations.
mobile around 110 times a day [1]. We use them to create and In this paper we are going to discuss the Mobile Cloud
share documents, store and play movies, for social media, and Computing architectures and deployments, challenges and
internet shopping. In addition to that, the original use of these limitations, applications of Mobile Cloud Computing, and
devices for voice/ video calls and messaging. With the growing features including resilience, security and scalability.
demand on mobile devices and the increase of useful
applications installed on them with sophisticated computations,
there is a growing challenge and related efficiency
requirements that need to be addressed [2]. For example, there
is a need on speeding up complex tasks such as image
processing and computer vision to avoid long delays to meet
the high expectations of the mobile device users.
Cloud computing involves distributing the load on the
computer resources connected to each other over the internet.
Also, it is based on virtualization of modern data centers which
involve thousands of interconnected servers with capability of
including a large number of applications. These resources are
available to the user as on- demand services with many benefits
such as scalability, mobility and availability [3].
The concept of Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) provides Fig. 1. Mobile Cloud Computing components.
the mobile devices users with data storage and processing
services from the cloud. MCC is an integration of cloud The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II
computing and mobile environment offering the smart phones provides an overview of Mobile Cloud Computing
user’s new facilities and services on their devices that was architecture and efficient deployments. Section III presents
difficult to be achieved without the existence of the cloud. As

978-1-4673-9431-4/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE 272

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DOI 10.1109/ECONF.2015.59
MCC features and challenges with their solutions. Section IV
presents cloud testing, and finally section V concludes this
paper.
II. MOBILE CLOUD COMPUTING ARCHETUCTRE AND
DEPLOYMENT
In the typical MCC model, the mobile devices are directly
connected to the Enterprise Cloud (EC) through known
technologies such as 3G/4G/LTE. This connection consumes
the mobile device battery, and in most cases there is a network
latency encountered. Taking in consideration that not all of
these mobile devices do need to use the EC all the time to
perform complex tasks, there should be another MCC model to
save the energy and reduce the latency.
The Mobile Cloud Computing Model based on the cloudlet
is proposed to solve the energy/latency problems [6]. Cloudlet
is a trusted computer or a group of computers-cluster have a
high capabilities and connected to the internet. It allows the
user to get the services from the cloudlet instead of the cloud
itself. Consequently there will be low latency, one hop
wireless access point, high bandwidth and real time response.
Figure 2 shows two types of architectures in mobile cloud
computing: Cloudlet and Non-Cloudlet Architectures. In Non-
Cloudlet Architecture, there are three components: mobile
device, communication channel and cloud. The mobile device
sends a request to the Enterprise Cloud (EC) and the cloud
provides the service. In this scenario, there is a noticeable high
latency due to the fact that the EC services thousand of requests
at a time. The proposed solution is to use the cloudlet
architecture where the mobile device communicates first with
the local cloudlet requesting for the service. If not found, or
the cloudlet don’t have the processing capability to provide it,
then the mobile user will be forwarded to the EC. It is worth
mentioning that the connection between the mobile and the
user is through available cheap technologies such as WiFi not
3G/LTE. More details about the Cloudlet-based mobile cloud
computing model and deployment at large scale are presented
in [4].
Fig. 2. Types oTf Architectures in MCC.
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III. MOBILE CLOUD COMPUTING FEATURES
This section presents main features and benefits of MCC.
1) Improving reliability using Mobile Cloud Computing
By storing data or running applications on clouds we
achieve a high reliability since data and applications are stored
and backed up on several computer, this will reduce the chance
of data loss.
2) Reducing Energy Consumption and Extending battery
life time
Energy efficiency is a major issue in Cloud computing
infrastructure, and the battery life time is one of the main
concerns for mobile users. By using mobile cloud computing
the complex computations that need intensive processing will
move from source limited devices to resourceful servers in the
cloud system. As a result, the execution time will be shortened
and power consumption will be reduced.
Extending battery lifetime is very important feature in
mobile devices [7]. Users prefer to use real-time and
interactive applications. But such applications require high
computing resources and consumes huge amount of power.
The cloud service providers and developers focus on energy
issues and challenges. There are many techniques used to save
power in mobile cloud computing systems [8], [9].[10], [11].
One approach to reduce the power consumption of the mobile
devices is through user profiling [8].
Another approach to reduce power consumption at large
scale, is by optimizing consumption at the data centers [9]. The
large power consumption is mainly attributed to the large
number of modern data centres operating within. Developing
these data centres includes dynamically expanding their
infrastructures to meet the ever-increasing demand for huge
computation, large storage, and massive communication.
Energy conservation through optimization of resources and
management policies in the Cloud are a viable solution. Using
virtualization to save power and employing such practices as
using Virtual Machines (VMs), Server Consolidation, and VM
Live Migration [9].
Furthermore, the mobile cloud systems based on the
cloudlets was originally proposed to reduce the power
consumption and latency [6]. This task will be more difficult
when large scale cloudlet systems are deployed. It will force
different cloudlets to cooperate in order to meet the users
demands for different types of services. This cooperation will
require routing of user requests from the local cloudlet to a
remote cloudlet. As a result, the total power consumption per
request which will be the summation of the user to the local
cloudlet power consumption and the power consumption for
routing the request to a remote cloudlet. The work in [11]
address the problem of optimizing the power consumption for
large scale cooperative cloudlets deployments and propose
efficient mathematical model for power consumption under
different realistic scenarios.
 On the other side, the designers aim to design power-
efficient operating system and applications. And since the
programs on our smart phones are either OS-related or
applications, we should ask the question: who will be
responsible for energy management? There are three
management approaches, application will do the management
but the problem is there is no main entity responsible for
monitoring and supervising resource consumption. The other
approach is that the OS monitors and manage energy resources
but this approach has the scalability problem. The last approach
is hybrid in which the OS and the application will be aware of
the resource utilization and supervision and that will help us to
improve performance.
3) Security and privacy
Protecting the data users information from adversaries is
essential to guarantee customer trust in the mobile cloud
computing environment. Mobile cloud computing security
issues can be classified into two categories. The first one is
Mobile users security: Mobile devices are exposed to various
security threats like malicious codes and other applications-
related vulnerabilities. For example, GPS applications can
cause some privacy issues. It is recommended that mobile users
should install and run security software to detect threats. The
second category is securing data on the cloud servers. it is the
case when the users have no control on data and they don’t
know anything about its location even. Maybe the data will be
lost due to physical damage or a malicious insider.
Example of Mobile cloud computing risks might be
internal were a customer can put a virus into cloud server
which may compromise data of other customers and
unfortunately cloud will not be able to track him/her due to
privacy policy.
Other security risks might be due to a technical error. For
example in IaaS a security threat might happen because of lack
isolation of virtualization in case of having several virtual
machines hosted on a single server [12].
4) Scalability
Mobile applications can be scaled up and scaled down to meet
unpredictable user demands. In contrast the service provider
can easily scale and expand services. The work in [13]
presents scalable mobile cloud computing model.
5) Management
Mobility allows users to move from place to another and
accordingly, there coverage area will change too. In MCC, the
mobile device must keep track of the previous, and current
clod systems dealing with. This is important because the
current cloud needs the data from the previous cloud to
continue working on it. There are two main management
methods in MCC cloudlet based model as shown in Table 1.
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TABLE I. Management Methods
Centralized De-Centralized
Where the Enterprise cloud Mobile device is responsible
responsible for tracking and for managing its movement
managing mobile device by storing a movement
movement and this can be history and the currently
done by storing tracking running services and the
information for mobile current cloudlet, because the
device. new cloud need to know the
old one if there is a task that
wasn’t completed.
As an example, lets assume that we have one enterprise cloud
and 6 cloudlets that will serve a number of mobile devices. To
reduce the overhead on the enterprise cloud we can say one of
the six cloudlet will elect itself to be a master –aggregate the
cloudlet requests then send a one request to the enterprise
cloud. The master cloudlet must change periodically to
distribute the overhead just like that the cloudlet that has not
been a master cloudlet for a long time is more likely to elect
itself than a cloudlet serving just recently. Furthermore, if
there are only few cloudlets, then the expected distance
between the mobile device and the cloudlet becomes longer
and therefore the mobile have to spend more energy to reach
its cloudlet. On the other hand, if there are many cloudlets,
there will be more energy expensive transmissions from
cloudlet to the enterprise cloud and less aggregation.
6) Fault tolerance
Most existing research and implementations put the light
on architecture specific solutions to introduce fault tolerance
[14]. Users who are using cloud computing they are more
concerned about it’s reliability. The fault tolerance is a very
important feature that should be incorporated in cloud
computing systems to avoid significant commercial and
reputation loss. As an example, when Amazon faced a failure
in Elastic Block Storage (EBS) drivers and network
configuration [15], the problem shot down thousands of hosted
applications and websites and this cost the company a lot of
money. In result, the applications need fault tolerance abilities
so they can be such robust to overcome the impact of a single
point of failure and execute the functions correctly [16].
Nowadays, the application developer of cloud delivery models
must build reliable software that can handle environment-
specific features. Even though, there are some limitations such
that the user needs to know about configuration, selection and
integration of applications with available fault tolerance
framework. Also, another limitation facing fault tolerance
implementation is having an abstraction layers in cloud
architecture results in non-transparent and non-flexible
environments that requires too much effort by developers
since there is no details about the infrastructure.
7) Seamless connection handover
When we are moving from one access point to another
access point or from WiFi to 3G, our applications will
terminate or return errors. As illustrated in figure 3, the AP
represents a cell, and when we are moving from one AP to
another the service and connection quality might vary. We can
observe the neediness of using variety of access networks to
make services available to users. The key technique here is
how we can accomplish a seamless heterogeneous handover.
Obviously the performance of vertical handover will
immediately impact the assurance of quality of service.
Handover faces a lot of challenges, and the available
handover algorithms don’t have a high efficiency and
feasibility[17].
Fig. 3. Handover in Cloudlet-based Mobile Cloud Computing
8) Resilience and Bandwidth:
Cloud business rely on infrastructure and services delivered
through the internet. But there are many risks facing this
business such as they are vulnerable to network outages.
Internet can be considered high resilient, but the difficulties
came from a physical damage or form a local providers with
servers gone down. It doesn’t matter if we are using private
cloud or public cloud, the important thing is that the cloud
infrastructure must be right resilient. The bandwidth is not
unlimited so in public cloud computing users may suffer some
latency especially in peak demand [18].
IV. CLOUD AND MOBILE APPLICATIONS TESTING
Testing-as-a-service (TaaS) is a new model to provide testing
capabilities to the end users, developers and businesses. Users
can reduce the cost of complicated maintenance and updated
effort. Service providers can update their services without
effecting the end-users. With the testing services users can
compare product reliability. The ease of detecting and solving
bugs will also minimize the time between detection and the
final bug fix [19]. There are many types of testing. Figure 2
shows some of them:
Functional testing: that include control tasks:
1- load/performance: to check response time, max load.
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2- Compliance: Standard in terms of data handling.
3- Latency: Due to communication problems, databases,
input/output.
4- Endurance: Should be one hindered availability [20].
Performance testing: The major types of performance test
are: loads, stress, reliability, scalability, volume and
interoperability. In traditional performance testing scenario
there is the application to be tested located at the lab with a
load controller and then the load generators located at various
remote locations. Many testing technology tools available like
load storm, load impact, push to test and platform lab. There
are many challenges facing testing in the cloud environment
such as: lack of standards, security and privacy concerns, lack
of control and Internet dependency [21].
Mobile applications became a part of our daily life,
and hence we are looking for best quality applications, the need
for testing rises to ensure that. Testing a mobile application
differs than a traditional application due to device diversity
since every mobile device have different screen size, screen
orientation, the available memory, chipset, OS, and architecture
[22].
Mobile applications testing challenges illustrated in figure 5.
There is a different type of cloud testing: stress, compatibility,
load, performance, browser performance, latency and
functionality. There is a different automated testing tools that
that can be used [22]
Fig. 5. Challenges in cloud testing
On the other hand, people spent most of their time checking
their mobile applications and moving from one application to
another [23]. There is a wide range of useful mobile cloud
computing applications such as: Mobile Commerce and
banking which is estimated to be about $ 23 billion by 2016.
Mobile Learning, is also a useful application to facilitate
access to the education systems. Also, mobile healthcare,
image processing, social networking, and gamming [23].
 V. CONCLUSION
Mobile cloud computing is a highly promising trend and it
became one of the top research topics nowadays. Mobile cloud
computing integrates the advantages of both cloud computing
and mobile devices (mobility). In this paper, we viewed MCC
efficient architecture that was proposed based on cloudlet to
save energy and reduce network latency. Also, we presented
main challenges and issues related to MCC such as security,
resilience, fault tolerance, and reliability. Also, we addressed
cloud and mobile applications testing. We conclude that MCC
will continue spreading and at the same time more challenges
and requirements will continue to appear. Some of these issues
and challenges have solutions and but others need more effort
and research to solve them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is funded by grant number (13-ELE2527-10)
from the Long-Term National Science Technology and
Innovation Plan (LT-NSTIP), the King Abdul-Aziz City for
Science and Technology (KACST), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
We thank the Science and Technology Unit at Umm Al-Qura
University for their continuous logistics support.
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