Towards mobile cloud applications: Offloading resource-intensive tasks to hybrid clouds

Abstract

Purpose: Cloud computing becomes mobile when a mobile device tries to access the shared pool of computing resources provided by the cloud, on demand. Mobile applications may enrich their functionality by delegating heavy tasks to the clouds as the remote processing and storage have become possible by adding asynchronous behavior in the communication. However, developing mobile cloud applications involves working with services and APIs from different cloud vendors, which mostly are not interoperable across clouds. Moreover, by adding asynchronicity, mobile applications must rely on push mechanisms which are considered to be moderately reliable, and thus not recommended in scenarios that require high scalability and quality of service (QoS). To counter these problems, and the purpose of this paper, is to design a middleware framework, Mobile Cloud Middleware (MCM), which handles the interoperability issues and eases the use of process-intensive services from smartphones by extending the concept of mobile host. Design/methodology/approach: MCM is developed as an intermediary between the mobile and the cloud, which hides the complexity of dealing with multiple cloud services from mobiles. Several applications are presented to show the benefits of mobiles going cloud-aware. Moreover, to verify the scalability of MCM, load tests are performed on the hybrid cloud resources using well known load balancing mechanisms like HAProxy and Tsung. Findings: From the study it was found that it is possible to handle hybrid cloud services from mobiles by using MCM. The analysis demonstrated that the MCM shows reasonable performance levels of interaction with the user, thus validating the proof of concept. Moreover, MCM decreases the effort in developing mobile cloud applications and helps in keeping soft-real time responses by using its asynchronous approach. Originality/value: MCM fosters the utilization of different types of cloud services rather than the traditional mobile cloud services based on data synchronization. By offloading heavy tasks to the clouds, the framework extends the processing power and storage space capabilities of the constrained smart phones. The applications mentioned in the paper bring an added value by being success stories for mobile cloud computing domain in general. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.