Junaid Shuja

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.

Survey of Techniques and Architectures for Designing Energy-Efficient Data Centers

Cloud computing has emerged as the leading paradigm for information technology businesses. Cloud computing provides a platform to manage and deliver computing services around the world over the Internet. Cloud services have helped businesses utilize computing services on demand with no upfront investments. The cloud computing paradigm has sustained its growth, which has led to increase in size and number of data centers. Data centers with thousands of computing devices are deployed as back end to provide cloud services. Computing devices are deployed redundantly in data centers to ensure 24/7 availability. However, many studies have pointed out that data centers consume large amount of electricity, thus calling for energy-efficiency measures. In this survey, we discuss research issues related to conflicting requirements of maximizing quality of services (QoSs) (availability, reliability, etc.) delivered by the cloud services while minimizing energy consumption of the data center resources. In this paper, we present the concept of inception of data center energy-efficiency controller that can consolidate data center resources with minimal effect on QoS requirements. We discuss software- and hardware-based techniques and architectures for data center resources such as server, memory, and network devices that can be manipulated by the data center controller to achieve energy efficiency.

Energy-efficient data centers

Energy consumption of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector has grown exponentially in recent years. A major component of the today’s ICT is constituted by the data centers which have experienced an unprecedented growth in their size and population, recently. The Internet giants like Google, IBM and Microsoft house large data centers for cloud computing and application hosting. Many studies, on energy consumption of data centers, point out to the need to evolve strategies for energy efficiency. Due to large-scale carbon dioxide (

Towards native code offloading based MCC frameworks for multimedia applications

\mathrm{CO}_2

Case of ARM emulation optimization for offloading mechanisms in Mobile Cloud Computing

) emissions, in the process of electricity production, the ICT facilities are indirectly responsible for considerable amounts of green house gas emissions. Heat generated by these densely populated data centers needs large cooling units to keep temperatures within the operational range. These cooling units, obviously, escalate the total energy consumption and have their own carbon footprint. In this survey, we discuss various aspects of the energy efficiency in data centers with the added emphasis on its motivation for data centers. In addition, we discuss various research ideas, industry adopted techniques and the issues that need our immediate attention in the context of energy efficiency in data centers.

SIMDOM: A framework for SIMD instruction translation and offloading in heterogeneous mobile architectures

The staggering growth in smartphone and wearable device use has led to a massive scale generation of personal (user-specific) data. To explore, analyze, and extract useful information and knowledge from the deluge of personal data, one has to leverage these devices as the data-mining platforms in ubiquitous, pervasive, and big data environments. This study presents the personal ecosystem where all computational resources, communication facilities, storage and knowledge management systems are available in user proximity. An extensive review on recent literature has been conducted and a detailed taxonomy is presented. The performance evaluation metrics and their empirical evidences are sorted out in this paper. Finally, we have highlighted some future research directions and potentially emerging application areas for personal data mining using smartphones and wearable devices.

Greening emerging IT technologies: techniques and practices

A number of resource-intensive applications, such as augmented reality, natural language processing, object recognition, and multimedia-based software are pushing the computational and energy boundaries of smartphones. Cloud-based services augment the resource-scare capabilities of smartphones while offloading compute-intensive methods to resource-rich cloud servers. The amalgam of cloud and mobile computing technologies has ushered the rise of Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) paradigm which envisions operating smartphones and modern mobile devices beyond their intrinsic capabilities. System virtualization, application virtualization, and dynamic binary translation (DBT) techniques are required to address the heterogeneity of smartphone and cloud architectures. However, most of the current research work has only focused on the offloading of virtualized applications while giving limited consideration to native code offloading. Moreover, researchers have not attended to the requirements of multimedia based applications in MCC offloading frameworks. In this study, we present a survey and taxonomy of state-of-the-art MCC frameworks, DBT techniques for native offloading, and cross-platform execution techniques for multimedia based applications. We survey the MCC frameworks from the perspective of offload enabling techniques. We focus on native code offloading frameworks and analyze the DBT and emulation techniques of smartphones (ARM) on a cloud server (x86) architectures. Furthermore, we debate the open research issues and challenges to native offloading of multimedia based smartphone applications. We deliberate on DBT techniques for cross-platform heterogeneous smartphone and cloud architectures. DBT and emulation techniques are an essential part of native code based MCC offloading frameworks.We discuss techniques of cross-platform SIMD instruction translation and porting for multimedia based MCC applications.We provide a detailed taxonomy and parametric comparison of all the state-of-the-art studies discussed in the aforementioned directions.We identify research issues in current MCC offloading techniques, DBT optimization for process code migration based MCC offloading, and DBT optimizations for translation of SIMD instructions

Analysis of Vector Code Offloading Framework in Heterogeneous Cloud and Edge Architectures

The virtually unlimited available resources and wide range of services provided by the cloud have resulted in the emergence of new cloud-based applications, such as smart grids, smart building control, and virtual reality. These developments, however, have also been accompanied by a problem for delay-sensitive applications that have stringent delay requirements. The current cloud computing paradigm cannot realize the requirements of mobility support, location awareness, and low latency. Hence, to address the problem, an edge computing paradigm that aims to extend the cloud resources and services and enable them to be nearer the edge of an enterprises network has been introduced. In this article, we highlight the significance of edge computing by providing real-life scenarios that have strict constraint requirements on application response time. From the previous literature, we devise a taxonomy to classify the current research efforts in the domain of edge computing. We also discuss the key requirements that enable edge computing. Finally, current challenges in realizing the vision of edge computing are discussed.