NeTS: Small: Exploring Theoretical Foundation of Mobile Cloud: From One-Hop Neighbors to the Internet

North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC

Investigators

Abstract

The number of smartphones in use worldwide reached 1.038 billion units during the third quarter of 2012, and smartphone users are expected to be over 2 billion by 2015. With this fast-growing and a large asset of tablets and smartphones, the sheer number and density of wireless devices has overwhelmed network resources to support the level of quality expected by users. Utilizing cloud computing, mobile cloud computing (MCC) has been recently introduced to facilitate mobile users to take full advantages of cloud computing, even with the reduced available network capacity. The objective of this project is to explore fundamental issues that advance our understanding of using mobile clouds in delivering wireless data traffic. The proposed work aims to (i) explore sufficient and necessary conditions of mobile cloudlets through one-hop communications to ensure short delay and easy management of task dispatch; (ii) identify theoretical limits of mobile cloudlets by harnessing the latest understanding of link-level dynamics with the focus on the discrepancy in homogeneous and heterogeneous mobile nodes in the evolution of mobile cloudlets over time; (iii) investigate new algorithms that detect mobile clouds that are based on not only their spatial locations, but other factors, such as power-saving, tethering access points, non-exponential inter-contact time distributions, as well as social connections among mobile devices; (iv) find how long and how far it could take before data arrives at the cloud in a hybrid network model.