eXCloud: Transparent runtime support for scaling mobile applications in cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing augments applications with ease-of-access to the enormous resources on the Internet. Combined with mobile computing technologies, mobile applications can exploit the Cloud everywhere by statically distributing code segments or dynamically migrating running processes onto cloud services. Existing migration techniques are however too coarse-grained for mobile devices, so the overheads often offset the benefits of migration. To build a truly elastic mobile cloud computing infrastructure, we introduce eXCloud (eXtensible Cloud) - a middleware system with multi-level mobility support, ranging from as coarse as a VM instance to as fine as a runtime stack frame, and allows resources to be integrated and used dynamically. In eXCloud, a stack-on-demand (SOD) approach is used to support computation mobility throughout the mobile cloud environment. The approach is fully adaptive, goal-driven and transparent. By downward task migration, applications running on the cloud nodes can exploit or take control of special resources in mobile devices such as GPS and cameras. With a restorable MPI layer, task migrations of MPI parallel programs can happen between cloud nodes or be initiated from a mobile device. Our evaluation shows that SOD outperforms several existing migration mechanisms in terms of migration overhead and latency. All our techniques result in better resource utilization through task migrations among cloud nodes and mobile nodes.