Atta ur Rehman Khan

A Survey of Mobile Cloud Computing Application Models

Smart phones are now capable of supporting a wide range of applications, many of which demand an ever increasing computational power. This poses a challenge because smart phones are resource-constrained devices with limited computation power, memory, storage, and energy. Fortunately, the cloud computing technology offers virtually unlimited dynamic resources for computation, storage, and service provision. Therefore, researchers envision extending cloud computing services to mobile devices to overcome the smartphones constraints. The challenge in doing so is that the traditional smartphone application models do not support the development of applications that can incorporate cloud computing features and requires specialized mobile cloud application models. This article presents mobile cloud architecture, offloading decision affecting entities, application models classification, the latest mobile cloud application models, their critical analysis and future research directions.

A Survey of Mobile Device Virtualization: Taxonomy and State of the Art

Recent growth in the processing and memory resources of mobile devices has fueled research within the field of mobile virtualization. Mobile virtualization enables multiple persona on a single mobile device by hosting heterogeneous operating systems (OSs) concurrently. However, adding a virtualization layer to resource-constrained mobile devices with real-time requirements can lead to intolerable performance overheads. Hardware virtualization extensions that support efficient virtualization have been incorporated in recent mobile processors. Prior to hardware virtualization extensions, virtualization techniques that are enabled by performance prohibitive and resource consuming software were adopted for mobile devices. Moreover, mobile virtualization solutions lack standard procedures for device component sharing and interfacing between multiple OSSs. The objective of this article is to survey software- and hardware-based mobile virtualization techniques in light of the recent advancements fueled by the hardware support for mobile virtualization. Challenges and issues faced in virtualization of CPU, memory, I/O, interrupt, and network interfaces are highlighted. Moreover, various performance parameters are presented in a detailed comparative analysis to quantify the efficiency of mobile virtualization techniques and solutions.

Clustering-based power-controlled routing for mobile wireless sensor networks

This paper presents two new routing protocols for mobile sensor networks, viz. power-controlled routing (PCR) and its enhanced version, i.e. Enhanced Power-Controlled Routing (EPCR). In both the protocols, fixed transmission power is employed in the clustering phase but when ordinary nodes are about to send their data to their respective cluster-heads, they change their transmission power according to their distance from their cluster-head. While in PCR, the nodes are associated with the cluster-head on the basis of weight, in EPCR it is done on the basis of distance. In addition to the protocols, we are suggesting a packet loss recovery mechanism for the PCR and EPCR. Both protocols work well for both mobile and static networks and are designed to achieve high network lifetime, high packet delivery ratio, and high network throughput. These protocols are extensively simulated using mass mobility model, with different speeds and different number of nodes to evaluate their performance. Simulation results show that both PCR and EPCR are successful in achieving their objectives by using variable transmission powers and smart clustering. Copyright

Resource management in cloud computing

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular computing paradigm for hosting large computing systems and services. Recently, significant research is carried out on Resource Management (RM) techniques that focus on the efficient sharing of cloud resources among multiple users. RM techniques in cloud are designed for computing and workload intensive applications that have different optimization parameters. This study presents a comprehensive review of RM techniques and elaborates their extensive taxonomy based on the distinct features. It highlights evaluation parameters and platforms that are used to evaluate RM techniques. Moreover, it presents design goals and research challenges that should be considered while proposing novel RM techniques.

Incremental proxy re-encryption scheme for mobile cloud computing environment

Due to the limited computational capability of mobile devices, the research organization and academia are working on computationally secure schemes that have capability for offloading the computational intensive data access operations on the cloud/trusted entity for execution. Most of the existing security schemes, such as proxy re-encryption, manager-based re-encryption, and cloud-based re-encryption, are based on El-Gamal cryptosystem for offloading the computational intensive data access operation on the cloud/trusted entity. However, the resource hungry pairing-based cryptographic operations, such as encryption and decryption, are executed using the limited computational power of mobile device. Similarly, if the data owner wants to modify the encrypted file uploaded on the cloud storage, after modification the data owner must encrypt and upload the entire file on the cloud storage without considering the altered portion(s) of the file. In this paper, we have proposed an incremental version of proxy re-encryption scheme for improving the file modification operation and compared with the original version of the proxy re-encryption scheme on the basis of turnaround time, energy consumption, CPU utilization, and memory consumption while executing the security operations on mobile device. The incremental version of proxy re-encryption scheme shows significant improvement in results while performing file modification operations using limited processing capability of mobile devices.

Enhanced dynamic credential generation scheme for protection of user identity in mobile-cloud computing

To improve the resource limitation of mobile devices, mobile users may utilize cloud-computational and storage services. Although the utilization of the cloud services improves the processing and storage capacity of mobile devices, the migration of confidential information on untrusted cloud raises security and privacy issues. Considering the security of mobile-cloud-computing subscribers’ information, a mechanism to authenticate legitimate mobile users in the cloud environment is sought. Usually, the mobile users are authenticated in the cloud environment through digital credential methods, such as password. Once the users’ credential information theft occurs, the adversary can use the hacked information for impersonating the mobile user later on. The alarming situation is that the mobile user is unaware about adversary’s malicious activities. In this paper, a light-weight security scheme is proposed for mobile user in cloud environment to protect the mobile user’s identity with dynamic credentials. The proposed scheme offloads the frequently occurring dynamic credential generation operations on a trusted entity to keep minimum processing burden on the mobile device. To enhance the security and reliability of the scheme, the credential information is updated frequently on the basis of mobile-cloud packets exchange. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is compared with the existing scheme on the basis of performance metrics i.e. turnaround time and energy consumption. The experimental results for the proposed scheme showed significant improvement in turnaround time and energy consumption as compared to the existing scheme.

A performance comparison of open source network simulators for wireless networks

Network simulation is the most useful and common methodology used to evaluate different network topologies without real world implementation. Network simulators are widely used by the research community to evaluate new theories and hypotheses. There are a number of network simulators, for instance, ns-2, ns-3, OMNET++, SWAN, OPNET, Jist, and GloMoSiM etc. Therefore, the selection of a network simulator for evaluating research work is a crucial task for researchers. The main focus of this paper is to compare the state-of-the-art, open source network simulators based on the following parameters: CPU utilization, memory usage, computational time, and scalability by simulating a MANET routing protocol, to identify an optimal network simulator for the research community.

BSS: block-based sharing scheme for secure data storage services in mobile cloud environment

For the last few years, academia and research organizations are continuously investigating and resolving the security and privacy issues of mobile cloud computing environment. The additional consideration in designing security services for mobile cloud computing environment should be the resource-constrained mobile devices. The execution of computationally intensive security services on mobile device consumes battery’s charging quickly. In this regard, the study presents a novel energy-efficient block-based sharing scheme that provides confidentiality and integrity services for mobile users in the cloud environment. The block-based sharing scheme is compared with the existing schemes on the basis of energy consumption, CPU utilization, memory utilization, encryption time, decryption time, and turnaround time. The experimental results show that the block-based sharing scheme consumes less energy, reduces the resources utilization, improves response time, and provides better security services to the mobile users in the presence of fully untrusted cloud server(s) as compared to the existing security schemes.

MobiByte: An Application Development Model for Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile cloud computing presents an effective solution to overcome smartphone constraints, such as limited computational power, storage, and energy. As the traditional mobile application development models do not support computation offloading, mobile cloud computing requires novel application development models that can facilitate the development of cloud enabled mobile applications. This paper presents a mobile cloud application development model, named MobiByte, to enhance mobile device applications’ performance, energy efficiency, and execution support. MobiByte is a context-aware application model that uses multiple data offloading techniques to support a wide range of applications. The proposed model is validated using prototype applications and detailed results are presented. Moreover, MobiByte is compared with the most recent application models with a conclusion that it outperforms the existing application models in many aspects like energy efficiency, performance, generality, context awareness, and privacy.

Context-Aware Mobile Cloud Computing and Its Challenges

Cloud computing is gaining popularity due to virtually unlimited resources, low capital cost, ease of adoption, flexible resource provisioning, and high scalability. Considering these benefits, researchers envision the usage of cloud computing for mobile devices to overcome the ever-increasing computational and energy demands of smartphone applications. However, this requires specialized context-ware application development models that can facilitate the development of cloud-enabled applications capable of making context-aware computation offloading decisions. This article provides an overview of mobile cloud computing technology, focusing on its context-awareness aspects and challenges.