Uniport: A Uniform Programming Support Framework for Mobile Cloud Computing

Personal mobile devices (PMDs) have become the most used computing devices for many people. With the introduction of mobile cloud computing, we can augment the storage and computing capabilities of PMDs via cloud support. However, there are many challenges in developing mobile cloud applications (MCAs) that incorporate cloud computing efficiently, especially for developers targeting multiple mobile platforms. This paper presents Uniport, a uniform framework for developing MCAs. We introduce a uniform architecture for MCAs based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern and a set of programming primitives and runtime libraries. Not only can Uniport support the creation of new MCAs, it can also help transform existing mobile applications to MCAs efficiently. We demonstrate the applicability and flexibility of Uniport in a case study to transform three existing mobile applications on iOS, Android and Windows Phone, to their mobile cloud versions respectively. Evaluation results show that, with very few modifications, we can easily transform mobile applications to MCAs that can exploit the cloud support to improve performance by 3 - 7x and save more than half of their energy consumption.