Mobile cloud computing framework for a pervasive and ubiquitous environment

Min Choi, Jonghyuk Park and Young-Sik Jeong

Abstract

The increasing use of wireless Internet and smartphone has accelerated the need for pervasive and ubiquitous computing (PUC). Smartphones stimulate growth of location-based service and mobile cloud computing. However, smartphone mobile computing poses challenges because of the limited battery capacity, constraints of wireless networks and the limitations of device. A fundamental challenge arises as a result of power-inefficiency of location awareness. The location awareness is one of smartphone’s killer applications; it runs steadily and consumes a large amount of power. Another fundamental challenge stems from the fact that smartphone mobile devices are generally less powerful than other devices. Therefore, it is necessary to offload the computation-intensive part by careful partitioning of application functions across a cloud. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient location-based service (LBS) and mobile cloud convergence. This framework reduces the power dissipation of LBSs by substituting power-intensive sensors with the use of less-power-intensive sensors, when the smartphone is in a static state, for example, when lying idle on a table in an office. The substitution is controlled by a finite state machine with a user-movement detection strategy. We also propose a seamless connection handover mechanism between different access networks. For convenient on-site establishment, our approach is based on the end-to-end architecture between server and a smartphone that is independent of the internal architecture of current 3G cellular networks.

Keywords  Low-power location awareness – Location-based service – Mobile cloud offloading – Connection handover – Pervasive and ubiquitous computing – Cloud computing