Access Schemes for Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile Cloud Computing is widely accepted as a concept that can significantly improve the user experience when accessing mobile services. By removing the limitations of mobile devices with respect to storage and computing capabilities and providing a new level of security by a centralized maintenance of security-critical software for e.g. mobile payment applications, it is expected that it will find broad acceptance on the business as well as consumer side. Research indicates [1] that Mobile Cloud Computing will additionally help to make visions of context services become reality. However, Mobile Cloud Computing concepts rely on an always-on connectivity and will need to provide a scalable and - when requested - quality mobile access. ”Intelligent access” schemes meeting these requirements will be discussed in this paper. They exploit the specific information available by the ”Mobile Cloud Controller”, i.e., theusers’ location, context, and requested services, and significantly evolve the Heterogeneous Access Management schemes developed for the traditional heterogeneous access scenarios. In order to evaluate the performance of these intelligent radio access management concepts in the framework of mobile cloud computing, a specialized radio network simulator will be introduced. It will be shown that a Mobile Cloud Controller establishing a Context Management Architecture can provide the requested availability and quality of mobile connectivity.