Muhammad Shiraz

A Review on Distributed Application Processing Frameworks in Smart Mobile Devices for Mobile Cloud Computing

The latest developments in mobile devices technology have made smartphones as the future computing and service access devices. Users expect to run computational intensive applications on Smart Mobile Devices (SMDs) in the same way as powerful stationary computers. However in spite of all the advancements in recent years, SMDs are still low potential computing devices, which are constrained by CPU potentials, memory capacity and battery life time. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the latest practical solution for alleviating this incapacitation by extending the services and resources of computational clouds to SMDs on demand basis. In MCC, application offloading is ascertained as a software level solution for augmenting application processing capabilities of SMDs. The current offloading algorithms offload computational intensive applications to remote servers by employing different cloud models. A challenging aspect of such algorithms is the establishment of distributed application processing platform at runtime which requires additional computing resources on SMDs. This paper reviews existing Distributed Application Processing Frameworks (DAPFs) for SMDs in MCC domain. The objective is to highlight issues and challenges to existing DAPFs in developing, implementing, and executing computational intensive mobile applications within MCC domain. It proposes thematic taxonomy of current DAPFs, reviews current offloading frameworks by using thematic taxonomy and analyzes the implications and critical aspects of current offloading frameworks. Further, it investigates commonalities and deviations in such frameworks on the basis significant parameters such as offloading scope, migration granularity, partitioning approach, and migration pattern. Finally, we put forward open research issues in distributed application processing for MCC that remain to be addressed.

A survey on virtual machine migration and server consolidation frameworks for cloud data centers

Modern Cloud Data Centers exploit virtualization for efficient resource management to reduce cloud computational cost and energy budget. Virtualization empowered by virtual machine (VM) migration meets the ever increasing demands of dynamic workload by relocating VMs within Cloud Data Centers. VM migration helps successfully achieve various resource management objectives such as load balancing, power management, fault tolerance, and system maintenance. However, being resource-intensive, the VM migration process rigorously affects application performance unless attended by smart optimization methods. Furthermore, a Cloud Data Centre exploits server consolidation and DVFS methods to optimize energy consumption. This paper reviews state-of-the-art bandwidth optimization schemes, server consolidation frameworks, DVFS-enabled power optimization, and storage optimization methods over WAN links. Through a meticulous literature review of state-of-the-art live VM migration schemes, thematic taxonomies are proposed to categorize the reported literature. The critical aspects of virtual machine migration schemes are investigated through a comprehensive analysis of the existing schemes. The commonalties and differences among existing VM migration schemes are highlighted through a set of parameters derived from the literature. Finally, open research issues and trends in the VM migration domain that necessitate further consideration to develop optimal VM migration schemes are highlighted.

Big data: survey, technologies, opportunities, and challenges.

Big Data has gained much attention from the academia and the IT industry. In the digital and computing world, information is generated and collected at a rate that rapidly exceeds the boundary range. Currently, over 2 billion people worldwide are connected to the Internet, and over 5 billion individuals own mobile phones. By 2020, 50 billion devices are expected to be connected to the Internet. At this point, predicted data production will be 44 times greater than that in 2009. As information is transferred and shared at light speed on optic fiber and wireless networks, the volume of data and the speed of market growth increase. However, the fast growth rate of such large data generates numerous challenges, such as the rapid growth of data, transfer speed, diverse data, and security. Nonetheless, Big Data is still in its infancy stage, and the domain has not been reviewed in general. Hence, this study comprehensively surveys and classifies the various attributes of Big Data, including its nature, definitions, rapid growth rate, volume, management, analysis, and security. This study also proposes a data life cycle that uses the technologies and terminologies of Big Data. Future research directions in this field are determined based on opportunities and several open issues in Big Data domination. These research directions facilitate the exploration of the domain and the development of optimal techniques to address Big Data.

Cloud Service Selection Using Multicriteria Decision Analysis

Cloud computing (CC) has recently been receiving tremendous attention from the IT industry and academic researchers. CC leverages its unique services to cloud customers in a pay-as-you-go, anytime, anywhere manner. Cloud services provide dynamically scalable services through the Internet on demand. Therefore, service provisioning plays a key role in CC. The cloud customer must be able to select appropriate services according to his or her needs. Several approaches have been proposed to solve the service selection problem, including multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA). MCDA enables the user to choose from among a number of available choices. In this paper, we analyze the application of MCDA to service selection in CC. We identify and synthesize several MCDA techniques and provide a comprehensive analysis of this technology for general readers. In addition, we present a taxonomy derived from a survey of the current literature. Finally, we highlight several state-of-the-art practical aspects of MCDA implementation in cloud computing service selection. The contributions of this study are four-fold: (a) focusing on the state-of-the-art MCDA techniques, (b) highlighting the comparative analysis and suitability of several MCDA methods, (c) presenting a taxonomy through extensive literature review, and (d) analyzing and summarizing the cloud computing service selections in different scenarios.

Application partitioning algorithms in mobile cloud computing

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) enables the development of computational intensive mobile applications by leveraging the application processing services of computational clouds. Contemporary distributed application processing frameworks use runtime partitioning of elastic applications in which additional computing resources are occurred in runtime application profiling and partitioning. A number of recent studies have highlighted the different aspects of MCC. Current studies, however, have overlooked into the mechanism of application partitioning for MCC. We consider application partitioning to be an independent aspect of dynamic computational offloading and therefore we review the current status of application partitioning algorithms (APAs) to identify the issues and challenges. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to propose a thematic taxonomy for APAs in MCC. The APAs are reviewed comprehensively to qualitatively analyze the implications and critical aspects. Furthermore, the APAs are analyzed based on partitioning granularity, partitioning objective, partitioning model, programming language support, presence of a profiler, allocation decision, analysis technique, and annotation. This paper also highlights the issues and challenges in partitioning of elastic application to assist in selecting appropriate research domains and exploring lightweight techniques of distributed application processing in MCC.

A study on virtual machine deployment for application outsourcing in mobile cloud computing

In mobile cloud computing, application offloading is implemented as a software level solution for augmenting computing potentials of smart mobile devices. VM is one of the prominent approaches for offloading computational load to cloud server nodes. A challenging aspect of such frameworks is the additional computing resources utilization in the deployment and management of VM on Smartphone. The deployment of Virtual Machine (VM) requires computing resources for VM creation and configuration. The management of VM includes computing resources utilization in the monitoring of VM in entire lifecycle and physical resources management for VM on Smartphone. The objective of this work is to ensure that VM deployment and management requires additional computing resources on mobile device for application offloading. This paper analyzes the impact of VM deployment and management on the execution time of application in different experiments. We investigate VM deployment and management for application processing in simulation environment by using CloudSim, which is a simulation toolkit that provides an extensible simulation framework to model the simulation of VM deployment and management for application processing in cloud-computing infrastructure. VM deployment and management in application processing is evaluated by analyzing VM deployment, the execution time of applications and total execution time of the simulation. The analysis concludes that VM deployment and management require additional resources on the computing host. Therefore, VM deployment is a heavyweight approach for process offloading on smart mobile devices.

A review on interworking and mobility techniques for seamless connectivity in mobile cloud computing

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) leverages computational clouds for mitigating resources limitations in mobile devices. However, the mobility attribute of mobile devices and the intrinsic limitations of wireless access medium obstruct to achieve the goal of seamless connectivity for accessing distributed services in MCC. Mobility involves the issues of handover, service quality degradation and disruption, whereas the intrinsic limitations of the wireless access medium includes the issues of connectivity fluctuation and heterogeneity of wireless data networks. Therefore, interworking between heterogeneous wireless data networks and mobility management are employed to achieve consistency and seamless connectivity for accessing distributed services in MCC. However, such techniques lack of managing packet loss, handover latency, signaling overhead, service degradation and disruption, guaranteed QoS, and connectivity failure. Therefore, providing seamless connectivity in the network intensive computing environment of mobile cloud computing is a challenging research perspective. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art for interworking and mobility techniques to highlight issues and challenges in transparently leveraging the services of computational clouds for mobile devices. It proposes thematic taxonomy for the classification of the interworking and mobility techniques and qualitatively analyzes the implications and critical aspects of such techniques. The similarities and differences of interworking and mobility techniques are presented on the basis of latency, packet loss, mobility approach, signaling overhead and architecture. Furthermore, we identify the open issues and challenges in seamless connectivity that remains to be addressed.

Investigation on runtime partitioning of elastic mobile applications for mobile cloud computing

The latest developments in mobile computing technology have increased the computing capabilities of smartphones in terms of storage capacity, features support such as multimodal connectivity, and support for customized user applications. Mobile devices are, however, still intrinsically limited by low bandwidth, computing power, and battery lifetime. Therefore, the computing power of computational clouds is tapped on demand basis for mitigating resources limitations in mobile devices. Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is believed to be able to leverage cloud application processing services for alleviating the computing limitations of smartphones. In MCC, application offloading is implemented as a significant software level solution for sharing the application processing load of smartphones. The challenging aspect of application offloading frameworks is the resources intensive mechanism of runtime profiling and partitioning of elastic mobile applications, which involves additional computing resources utilization on Smart Mobile Devices (SMDs). This paper investigates the overhead of runtime application partitioning on SMD by analyzing additional resources utilization on SMD in the mechanism of runtime application profiling and partitioning. We evaluate the mechanism of runtime application partitioning on SMDs in the SmartSim simulation environment and validate the overhead of runtime application profiling by running prototype application in the real mobile computing environment. Empirical results indicate that additional computing resources are utilized in runtime application profiling and partitioning. Hence, lightweight alternatives with optimal distributed deployment and management mechanism are mandatory for accessing application processing services of computational clouds.

Energy Efficient Computational Offloading Framework for Mobile Cloud Computing

The latest developments in mobile computing technology have changed user preferences for computing. However, in spite of all the advancements in the recent years, Smart Mobile Devices (SMDs) are still low potential computing devices which are limited in memory capacity, CPU speed and battery power lifetime. Therefore, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) employs computational offloading for enabling computationally intensive mobile applications on SMDs. However, state-of-the-art computational offloading frameworks lack of considering the additional overhead of components migration at runtime. Therefore resources intensive and energy consuming distributed application execution platform is established. This paper proposes a novel distributed Energy Efficient Computational Offloading Framework (EECOF) for the processing of intensive mobile applications in MCC. The framework focuses on leveraging application processing services of cloud datacenters with minimal instances of computationally intensive component migration at runtime. As a result, the size of data transmission and energy consumption cost is reduced in computational offloading for MCC. We evaluate the proposed framework by benchmarking prototype application in the real MCC environment. Analysis of the results show that by employing EECOF the size of data transmission over the wireless network medium is reduced by 84 % and energy consumption cost is reduced by 69.9 % in offloading different components of the prototype application. Hence, EECOF provides an energy efficient application layer solution for computational offloading in MCC.

MOMCC: Market-oriented architecture for Mobile Cloud Computing based on Service Oriented Architecture

The vision of augmenting computing capabilities of mobile devices, especially smartphones with least cost is likely transforming to reality leveraging cloud computing. Cloud exploitation by mobile devices breeds a new research domain called Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC). However, issues like portability and interoperability should be addressed for mobile augmentation which is a non-trivial task using component-based approaches. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a promising design philosophy embraced by mobile computing and cloud computing communities to stimulate portable, complex application using prefabricated building blocks called Services. Utilizing distant cloud resources to host and run Services is hampered by long WAN latency. Exploiting mobile devices in vicinity alleviates long WAN latency, while creates new set of issues like Service publishing and discovery as well as clientserver security, reliability, and Service availability. In this paper, we propose a market-oriented architecture based on SOA to stimulate publishing, discovering, and hosting Services on nearby mobiles, which reduces long WAN latency and creates a business opportunity that encourages mobile owners to embrace Service hosting. Group of mobile phones simulate a nearby cloud computing platform. We create new role of Service host by enabling unskilled mobile owners/users to host Services developed by skilled developers. Evidently, Service availability, reliability, and Service-oriented mobile application portability will increase towards green ubiquitous computing in our mobile cloud infrastructure.