An online context-aware mechanism for computation offloading in ubiquitous and mobile cloud environments

The Journal of Supercomputing - In ubiquitous environments today, there are numerous sensors that generate a large amount of data. The results of processing this massive data can be applied through...     

Effective opportunistic dissemination of spatio-temporal contents in mobile environments

Dissemination of spatio-temporally valid content from content providers to consumers is critical in certain application contexts as data items could lose their validity across time and space. Content sharing in challenged opportunistic environments remains a research challenge as existing solutions fail to exploit dissemination patterns across spatio-temporal limits. In this paper, we propose spatio-temporal reachability graphs to depict reachability of time- and space-sensitive content in opportunistic mobile environments. Furthermore, we develop an analytical framework to estimate content distribution in such environments and validate its feasibility over long-term datasets. We perform extensive trace-driven simulation studies to determine content dissemination properties of environments with known mobility patterns. The analytical framework estimates dissemination ratio, optimizes parameter setting, and tests transmission capacities of opportunistic environments. Proposed scheme is useful to content providers as well as receivers.     

面向云-端融合的移动互联网应用运行平台

与传统的互联网应用相比,移动互联网应用尽管也运行于Web技术栈之上,但移动设备的便携性和多样性,带来了客户端设备计算能力相对有限、数据存储随需而变、显示屏幕大小不一、本地应用与Web应用和服务难以交互等技术挑战.为此,本文设计实现了一种面向云-端融合的移动互联网应用运行平台.首先,提出一种符合移动互联网应用体系结构的构件模型,将客户端应用划分为数据、计算、界面和服务四个部分;其次,设计了一种实现云-端资源融合的构件运行框架,支持应用数据的按需存储、计算任务的云-端迁移、以及用户界面的动态切分;再次,设计了一种实现云-端服务融合的组装框架,支持客户端本地应用和传统Web应用的服务封装、和基于总线的服务即时组装;最后,基于Chrome浏览器实现了平台原型,支持基于HTML5和JavaScript的移动互联网应用,通过多个Web应用基准测试集和热点应用的实验,验证了平台的有效性和可行性.     

Mining multilevel and location-aware service patterns in mobile web environments

In this correspondence, we address the issue of efficiently mining multilevel and location-aware associated service patterns in a mobile web environment. In terms of multilevel concept, we consider the complex problem that locations and services are of hierarchical structures. We propose a new data mining method named two-dimensional multilevel (2-DML) association rules mining, which can efficiently discover the associated service request patterns by taking into account the multilevel properties of locations and services. The discovered patterns can be effectively utilized in real applications like location-based and personalized services. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work addressing this research issue. Some variations of the 2-DML method with different properties in terms of execution efficiency and memory efficiency were also developed. Through empirical evaluation, the proposed methods are shown to deliver good performance in terms of efficiency and scalability under various system conditions.     

Efficient data integrity auditing for storage security in mobile health cloud

Cloud storage services can enable data owners to eliminate the need for the initial investment of expensive infrastructure setup and also minimize development and maintenance costs. Outsourcing the health data to e-health cloud storage server is very beneficial. Nonetheless, storing the health data on cloud servers also brings serious security challenges. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient data integrity auditing scheme for cloud storage for mobile health applications. The authentication tag for each data block generated by biosensor nodes is minimal in our scheme due to the use of hash operation. Moreover, in data integrity checking phase, message-locked encryption scheme is utilized to encrypt and transport the auditing information of the checked data blocks, which significantly reduces the required amount of calculation and communication resources. Compared with the conventional third party auditing schemes, the presented scheme speeds up the tag generation and tag checking process by more than one thousand times.     

Dynamic cloud resource management for efficient media applications in mobile computing environments

Single-instruction-set architecture (Single-ISA) heterogeneous multi-core processors (HMP) are superior to Symmetric Multi-core processors in performance per watt. They are popular in many aspects of the Internet of Things, including mobile multimedia cloud computing platforms. One Single-ISA HMP integrates both fast out-of-order cores and slow simpler cores, while all cores are sharing the same ISA. The quality of service (QoS) is most important for virtual machine (VM) resource management in multimedia mobile computing, particularly in Single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core cloud computing platforms. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a dynamic cloud resource management (DCRM) policy to improve the QoS in multimedia mobile computing. DCRM dynamically and optimally partitions shared resources according to service or application requirements. Moreover, DCRM combines resource-aware VM allocation to maximize the effectiveness of the heterogeneous multi-core cloud platform. The basic idea for this performance improvement is to balance the shared resource allocations with these resources requirements. The experimental results show that DCRM behaves better in both response time and QoS, thus proving that DCRM is good at shared resource management in mobile media cloud computing.     

A survey on decision making for task migration in mobile cloud environments

The key idea of MCC is using powerful back-end computing nodes to enhance capabilities of small mobile devices and provide better user experiences. An effective and widely used approach to realize this is task migrations. Decision making is an important aspect of migrations which affects the feasibility and effectiveness of task migrations. There have been a number of research efforts to MCC which help make decisions for task migrations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on decision making for task migrations in MCC, including decision factors and algorithms. We observe that there are still some challenges such as comprehensive context awareness, unified migration standards, large-scale experiments, more involvement of latest achievements from artificial intelligence, and flexible decision-making mechanisms. The paper highlights these issues and challenges to attract more efforts to work on MCC.     

Energy-efficiency enhanced virtual machine scheduling policy for mixed workloads in cloud environments

Virtualization technology is an effective approach to improving the energy-efficiency in cloud platforms; however, it also introduces many energy-efficiency losses especially when I/O virtualization is involved. In this paper, we present an energy-efficiency enhanced virtual machine (VM) scheduling policy, namely Share-Reclaiming with Collective I/O (SRC-I/O), with aiming at reducing the energy-efficiency losses caused by I/O virtualization. The proposed SRC-I/O scheduler allows VMs to reclaim extra CPU shares in certain conditions so as to increase CPU utilization. Meanwhile, it separates I/O-intensive VMs from CPU-intensive ones and schedules them in a collective manner, so as to reduce the context-switching cost when scheduling mixed workloads. Extensive experiments are conducted on various platforms to investigate the performance of the proposed scheduler. The results indicate that when the system is in presence of mixed workloads, SRC-I/O scheduler outperforms many existing VM schedulers in terms of energy-efficiency and I/O responsiveness.     

Leveraging bandwidth improvements to web servers through enhanced network interfaces

Markets nowadays demand applications that require high communication throughputs to reach their adequate levels of performance. Although the bandwidth of the network links has increased allowing multiple gigabits per second, taking advantage of these links accounts for a high communication overhead, and thus a lot of processor cycles are used for communication tasks, diminishing the processor cycles that remain available for the application. In this paper, we evaluate the performance in web applications of a network interface that as it is distributed among the processors currently available in the node takes advantage of both the hardware (multiprocessor nodes and multicore architectures, as well as programmable network interface cards) and software elements present in the system, thus improving not only the effective communication throughputs and latencies, but also the capacity of the nodes to satisfy the requirements of the applications. Here, the usefulness of this distributed network interface to improve the performance of either static or dynamic web servers is shown. The ubiquity and the different computation/communication rates that can be found in web applications make the analysis of web servers interesting, as it could provide relevant conclusions about the efficiency of the different approaches to the design of high-performance network interfaces.     

移动云计算中一种虚拟机迁移的预拷贝传输策略研究

针对移动云计算中虚拟机迁移过程的性能优化问题,提出了一种基于最优停止理论的预拷贝传输策略。该策略通过最优停止理论对寻找最优传输速率的最优停止模型求解,从而获得最优传输速率,由此来减少虚拟机迁移过程中的迁移数据总量和总时间。在仿真实验中,将所提出的传输策略与相关文献的传输策略进行对比,给出不同传输策略的性能结果分析。实验结果表明,所提出的策略具有较少的迁移数据总量和总时间,能有效地提高迁移过程的性能。     

Dynamic replication of web contents

The phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web has brought huge increase in the traffic to the popular web sites. Long delays and denial of service experienced by the end-users, especially during the peak hours, continues to be the common problem while accessing popular sites. Replicating some of the objects at multiple sites in a distributed web-server environment is one of the possible solutions to improve the response time/latency. The decision of what and where to replicate requires solving a constraint optimization problem, which is NP-complete in general. In this paper, we consider the problem of placing copies of objects in a distributed web server system to minimize the cost of serving read and write requests when the web servers have limited storage capacity. We formulate the problem as a 0-1 optimization problem and present a polynomial time greedy algorithm with backtracking to dynamically replicate objects at the appropriate sites to minimize a cost function. To reduce the solution search space, we present necessary conditions for a site to have a replica of an object in order to minimize the cost function. We present simulation results for a variety of problems to illustrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed algorithms and compare them with those of some well-known algorithms. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithms.     

An MDE-based methodology for closed-world integrity constraint checking in the semantic web

Ontology-based data-centric systems support open-world reasoning. Therefore, for these systems, Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) are not suitable for expressing integrity constraints based on the closed-world assumption. Thus, the requirement of integrating the open-world assumption of OWL/SWRL with closed-world integrity constraint checking is inevitable. SPARQL, recommended by World Wide Web (W3C), is a query language for RDF graphs, and many research studies have shown that it is a perfect candidate for closed-world constraint checking for ontology-based data-centric applications. In this regard, many research studies have been performed to transform integrity constraints into SPARQL queries where some studies have shown the limitations of partial expressivity of knowledge bases while performing the indirect transformations, whereas others are limited to a platform-specific implementation. To address these issues, this paper presents a flexible and formal methodology that employs Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) to model closed-world integrity constraints for open-world reasoning. The proposed approach offers semantic validation of data by expressing integrity constraints at both the model level and the code level. Moreover, straightforward transformations from OWL/SWRL to SPARQL can be performed. Finally, the methodology is demonstrated via a real-world case study of water observations data.     

Evaluation of mobile cloud architectures

The progress of mobile cloud computing is currently facing a crossroad on whether to implement user-side tools for job offloading or adopt network-side architecture. Selecting the best mobile cloud architecture is vital for having clear decisions on the future of mobile cloud computing.This work will survey mobile cloud architectures and compare their performance against existing resource demanding applications. The comparison will be performed using physical implementation. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first published work numerically comparing mobile cloud architectures across various mobile cloud applications.     

An autonomic approach for P2P/cloud collaborative environments

The rise of Cloud Computing has progressively dimmed the interest in volunteer and peer-to-peer computing, in general. However, efficient and cost-effective large scale distributed collaborative environments cannot be achieved leveraging upon the Cloud alone. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid P2P/cloud approach where components and protocols are autonomically configured according to specific target goals, such as cost-effectiveness, reliability and availability. The proposed approach is based on the Networked Autonomic Machine (NAM) framework, which allows distributed system designers to include different kinds of cost and performance constraints. As an example, we show how the NAM-based approach can be used to design collaborative storage systems, enabling the definition of an autonomic policy to decide, according to cost minimization and data availability goals, how to part data chunks among peer nodes and Cloud, based on the local perception of the P2P network.     

Secure and efficient image retrieval through invariant features selection in insecure cloud environments

Neural Computing and Applications - Advances in computer vision technologies lead to a renewed focus on content-based image retrieval (CBIR) in computer multimedia content analysis applications....     

An energy-efficient task scheduling for mobile devices based on cloud assistant

Mobile cloud computing is an emerging service model to extend the capability and the battery life of mobile devices. Mostly one network application can be decomposed into fine-grained tasks which consist of sequential tasks and parallel tasks. With the assistance of mobile cloud computing, some tasks could be offloaded to the cloud for speeding up executions and saving energy. However, the task offloading results in some additional cost during the communication between cloud and mobile devices. Therefore, this paper proposes an energy-efficient scheduling of tasks, in which the mobile device offloads appropriate tasks to the cloud via a Wi-Fi access point. The scheduling aims to minimize the energy consumption of mobile device for one application under the constraint of total completion time. This task scheduling problem is reconstructed into a constrained shortest path problem and the LARAC method is applied to get the approximate optimal solution. The proposed energy-efficient strategy decreases 81.93% of energy consumption and 25.70% of time at most, compared with the local strategy. Moreover, the applicability and performance of the proposed strategy are verified in different patterns of applications, where the time constraint, the workload ratio between communication and computation are various.     

An enhanced authenticated key agreement protocol for wireless mobile communication

With the rapid progress of wireless mobile communication, the authenticated key agreement protocol has attracted an increasing amount of attention. However, due to the limitations of bandwidth and storage of the mobile devices, most of the existing authenticated key agreement protocols are not suitable for wireless mobile communication. Quite recently, Sui et al. have presented an efficient authenticated key agreement protocol based on elliptic curves cryptography and included their protocol in 3GPP2 specifications to improve the security of A-Key distribution. However, in this paper, we show that Sui et al.'s protocol can't resist the off-line password guessing attack, and therefore present an enhanced authenticated key agreement protocol. At the same time, we also consider including our enhanced protocol in 3GPP2 specifications.