A Mobile Cloud Computing System for Emergency Management

Emergency management systems deal with the dynamic processing of data, where response teams must continuously adapt to the changing conditions at the scene of the emergency. Response teams must make critical decisions in highly demanding situations using large volumes of sensor data. Mobile devices have limited processing, storage, and battery resources; therefore, the sensed data from the scene of the emergency must be transmitted and processed quickly using the best available networks and clouds. Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is expected to play a critical role in the computation and storage offloading of sensor data to the best available clouds. However, applications running on mobile devices using clouds and heterogeneous access networks such as Wi-Fi and 3G are prone to unpredictable cloud workloads, network congestion, and handoffs. This article presents M2C2, a system for mobility management in MCC, that supports mechanisms for multihoming, cloud and network probing, and cloud and network selection. Through a prototype implementation and experiments, the authors show that M2C2 supports mobility efficiently in MCC scenarios such as emergency management.