M2C2: A mobility management system for mobile cloud computing

Mobile devices have become an integral part of our daily lives. Applications running on these devices may avail storage and compute resources from the cloud(s). Further, a mobile device may also connect to heterogeneous access networks (HANs) such as WiFi and LTE to provide ubiquitous network connectivity to mobile applications. These devices have limited resources (compute, storage and battery) that may lead to service disruptions. In this context, mobile cloud computing enables offloading of computing and storage to the cloud. However, applications running on mobile devices using clouds and HANs are prone to unpredictable cloud workloads, network congestion and handoffs. To run these applications efficiently the mobile device requires the best possible cloud and network resources while roaming in HANs. This paper proposes, develops and validates a novel system called M²C² which supports mechanisms for: i.) multihoming, ii.) cloud and network probing, and iii.) cloud and network selection. We built a prototype system and performed extensive experimentation to validate our proposed M²C². Our results analysis shows that the proposed system supports mobility efficiently in mobile cloud computing.