Hybrid Mobile Cloud Computing Architecture with Load Balancing for Healthcare Systems

Healthcare is a fundamental part of every individual’s life.The healthcare industry is developing very rapidly with the help of advanced technologies.Many researchers are trying to build cloud-based healthcare applications that can be accessed by healthcare professionals from their premises,as well as by patients from their mobile devices through communication interfaces.These systems promote reliable and remote interactions between patients and healthcare professionals.However,there are several limitations to these innovative cloud computing-based systems,namely network availability,latency,battery life and resource availability.We propose a hybrid mobile cloud computing(HMCC)architecture to address these challenges.Furthermore,we also evaluate the performance of heuristic and dynamic machine learning based task scheduling and load balancing algorithms on our proposed architecture.We compare them,to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm;and provide their comparative results,to show latency and energy consumption performance.Challenging issues for cloudbased healthcare systems are discussed in detail.

Fuzzy Firefly Based Intelligent Algorithm for Load Balancing inMobile Cloud Computing

This paper presents a novel fuzzy firefly-based intelligent algorithm for load balancing in mobile cloud computing while reducing makespan.The proposed technique implicitly acts intelligently by using inherent traits of fuzzy and firefly.It automatically adjusts its behavior or converges depending on the information gathered during the search process and objective function.It works for 3-tier architecture,including cloudlet and public cloud.As cloudlets have limited resources,fuzzy logic is used for cloudlet selection using capacity and waiting time as input.Fuzzy provides human-like decisions without using any mathematical model.Firefly is a powerful meta-heuristic optimization technique to balance diversification and solution speed.It balances the load on cloud and cloudlet while minimizing makespan and execution time.However,it may trap in local optimum;levy flight can handle it.Hybridization of fuzzy fireflywith levy flight is a novel technique that provides reduced makespan,execution time,and Degree of imbalance while balancing the load.Simulation has been carried out on the Cloud Analyst platform with National Aeronautics and Space Administration(NASA)and Clarknet datasets.Results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms Ant Colony Optimization Queue Decision Maker(ACOQDM),Distributed Scheduling Optimization Algorithm(DSOA),andUtility-based Firefly Algorithm(UFA)when compared in terms of makespan,Degree of imbalance,and Figure of Merit.

Auto-Scaling Framework for Enhancing the Quality of Service in the Mobile Cloud Environments

On-demand availability and resource elasticity features of Cloud computing have attracted the focus of various research domains.Mobile cloud computing is one of these domains where complex computation tasks are offloaded to the cloud resources to augment mobile devices’cognitive capacity.However,the flexible provisioning of cloud resources is hindered by uncertain offloading workloads and significant setup time of cloud virtual machines(VMs).Furthermore,any delays at the cloud end would further aggravate the miseries of real-time tasks.To resolve these issues,this paper proposes an auto-scaling framework(ACF)that strives to maintain the quality of service(QoS)for the end users as per the service level agreement(SLA)negotiated assurance level for service availability.In addition,it also provides an innovative solution for dealing with the VM startup overheads without truncating the running tasks.Unlike the waiting cost and service cost tradeoff-based systems or threshold-rule-based systems,it does not require strict tuning in the waiting costs or in the threshold rules for enhancing the QoS.We explored the design space of the ACF system with the CloudSim simulator.The extensive sets of experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the ACF system in terms of good reduction in energy dissipation at the mobile devices and improvement in the QoS.At the same time,the proposed ACF system also reduces the monetary costs of the service providers.

Edge Cloud Selection in Mobile Edge Computing(MEC)-Aided Applications for Industrial Internet of Things(IIoT)Services

In many IIoT architectures,various devices connect to the edge cloud via gateway systems.For data processing,numerous data are delivered to the edge cloud.Delivering data to an appropriate edge cloud is critical to improve IIoT service efficiency.There are two types of costs for this kind of IoT network:a communication cost and a computing cost.For service efficiency,the communication cost of data transmission should be minimized,and the computing cost in the edge cloud should be also minimized.Therefore,in this paper,the communication cost for data transmission is defined as the delay factor,and the computing cost in the edge cloud is defined as the waiting time of the computing intensity.The proposed method selects an edge cloud that minimizes the total cost of the communication and computing costs.That is,a device chooses a routing path to the selected edge cloud based on the costs.The proposed method controls the data flows in a mesh-structured network and appropriately distributes the data processing load.The performance of the proposed method is validated through extensive computer simulation.When the transition probability from good to bad is 0.3 and the transition probability from bad to good is 0.7 in wireless and edge cloud states,the proposed method reduced both the average delay and the service pause counts to about 25%of the existing method.

Modelling Mobile-X Architecture for Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile Edge Computing(MEC)assists clouds to handle enormous tasks from mobile devices in close proximity.The edge servers are not allocated efficiently according to the dynamic nature of the network.It leads to processing delay,and the tasks are dropped due to time limitations.The researchersfind it difficult and complex to determine the offloading decision because of uncertain load dynamic condition over the edge nodes.The challenge relies on the offload-ing decision on selection of edge nodes for offloading in a centralized manner.This study focuses on minimizing task-processing time while simultaneously increasing the success rate of service provided by edge servers.Initially,a task-offloading problem needs to be formulated based on the communication and pro-cessing.Then offloading decision problem is solved by deep analysis on taskflow in the network and feedback from the devices on edge services.The significance of the model is improved with the modelling of Deep Mobile-X architecture and bi-directional Long Short Term Memory(b-LSTM).The simulation is done in the Edgecloudsim environment,and the outcomes show the significance of the proposed idea.The processing time of the anticipated model is 6.6 s.The following perfor-mance metrics,improved server utilization,the ratio of the dropped task,and number of offloading tasks are evaluated and compared with existing learning approaches.The proposed model shows a better trade-off compared to existing approaches.

Research on Mobile Internet Mobile Agent System Dynamic Trust Model for Cloud Computing

This paper analyzes the reasons for the formation of security problems in mobile agent systems, and analyzes and compares the security mechanisms and security technologies of existing mobile agent systems from the perspective of blocking attacks. On this basis, the host protection mobile agent protection technology is selected, and a method to enhance the security protection of mobile agents (referred to as IEOP method) is proposed. The method first encrypts the mobile agent code using the encryption function, and then encapsulates the encrypted mobile agent with the improved EOP protocol IEOP, and then traces the suspicious execution result. Experiments show that using this method can block most malicious attacks on mobile agents, and can protect the integrity and confidentiality of mobile agents, but the increment of mobile agent tour time is not large.

On Cost Aware Cloudlet Placement for Mobile Edge Computing

As accessing computing resources from the remote cloud inherently incurs high end-to-end(E2E)delay for mobile users,cloudlets,which are deployed at the edge of a network,can potentially mitigate this problem.Although some research works focus on allocating workloads among cloudlets,the cloudlet placement aiming to minimize the deployment cost(i.e.,consisting of both the cloudlet cost and average E2E delay cost)has not been addressed effectively so far.The locations and number of cloudlets have a crucial impact on both the cloudlet cost in the network and average E2E delay of users.Therefore,in this paper,we propose the Cost Aware cloudlet PlAcement in moBiLe Edge computing(CAPABLE)strategy,where both the cloudlet cost and average E2E delay are considered in the cloudlet placement.To solve this problem,a Lagrangian heuristic algorithm is developed to achieve the suboptimal solution.After cloudlets are placed in the network,we also design a workload allocation scheme to minimize the E2E delay between users and their cloudlets by considering the user mobility.The performance of CAPABLE has been validated by extensive simulations.

Energy-Optimal and Delay-Bounded Computation Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing with Heterogeneous Clouds

By Mobile Edge Computing(MEC), computation-intensive tasks are offloaded from mobile devices to cloud servers, and thus the energy consumption of mobile devices can be notably reduced. In this paper, we study task offloading in multi-user MEC systems with heterogeneous clouds, including edge clouds and remote clouds. Tasks are forwarded from mobile devices to edge clouds via wireless channels, and they can be further forwarded to remote clouds via the Internet. Our objective is to minimize the total energy consumption of multiple mobile devices, subject to bounded-delay requirements of tasks. Based on dynamic programming, we propose an algorithm that minimizes the energy consumption, by jointly allocating bandwidth and computational resources to mobile devices. The algorithm is of pseudo-polynomial complexity. To further reduce the complexity, we propose an approximation algorithm with energy discretization, and its total energy consumption is proved to be within a bounded gap from the optimum. Simulation results show that, nearly 82.7% energy of mobile devices can be saved by task offloading compared with mobile device execution.

Adaptive Service Provisioning for Mobile Edge Cloud

A mobile edge cloud provides a platform to accommodate the offloaded traffic workload generated by mobile devices.It can significantly reduce the access delay for mobile application users.However,the high user mobility brings significant challenges to the service provisioning for mobile users,especially to delay-sensitive mobile applications.With the objective to maximize a profit,which positively associates with the overall admitted traffic served by the local edge cloud,and negatively associates with the access delay as well as virtual machine migration delay,we study a fundamental problem in this paper:how to update the service provisioning solution for a given group of mobile users.Such a profit-maximization problem is formulated as a nonlinear integer linear programming and linearized by absolute value manipulation techniques.Then,we propose a framework of heuristic algorithms to solve this Nondeterministic Polynomial(NP)-hard problem.The numerical simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the devised algorithms.Some useful summaries are concluded via the analysis of evaluation results.

D2D Multicast Retransmission Algorithm in Mobile Cloud Based on SINR Constraint

In cellular network, users with same demand and in proximity to each other form the mobile cloud, in which the short-range D2 D technology is employed by users to improve the data dissemination efficiency. In view of the fact that the D2 D links with the poor channel conditions are likely to be the bottleneck of resource utilization improvement, aiming at the differentiation of link quality, this paper proposes a intra-cloud D2 D multicast retransmission algorithm based on SINR constraint to meet the minimum requirement of D2 D retransmission for Qo S. In the proposed algorithm, the model of system link cost is built, the number of multicast retransmission times is restricted and each link quality matrix is traversed to reasonably select the multicast transmitter as well as its routing, which further reduces the link cost consumption, and in turn improves the bandwidth efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is more efficient to improve the bandwidth utilization when the ratio between normal user and non-normal user is small in mobile cloud.

Mobile Content Distribution with Vehicular Cloud in Urban VANETs

Plenty of multimedia contents such as traffic images, surveillance video, music and movie will flood into vehicular ad hoc networks. However, content distribution over VANETs is not a easy task, due to the high mobility of vehicles and intermittent connectivity. Infrastructure-based scheme can relieve the problem, but with a large amount of investment. In this paper, we propose a mobile content distribution scheme based on roadside parking cloud(RPC), which is formed by the parked car on the roadside, and mobile cloud(MC), which is formed by moving cars on the road. According to a trip history model, a mobile car can estimate its following trajectory. When it wants to download the content, gateway node of the RPC will work out a downloading schedule, which tells it how much chunks it can download from which RPCs. Moreover, the helper of the mobile car in mobile cloud would deliver specified chunks to it when there is lack of RPC in the following trip. Simulation results show that cloud-based scheme performs better than inter-vehicle communication approach and cluster-based scheme.

A Survey of Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile Cloud Computing （MCC） is emerging as one of the most important branches of cloud computing. In this paper, MCC is defined as cloud computing extended by mobility, and a new ad-hoc infrastructure based on mobile devices. It provides mobile users with data storage and processing services on a cloud computing platform. Because mobile cloud computing is still in its infancy we aim to clarify confusion that has arisen from different views. Existing works are reviewed, and an overview of recent advances in mobile cloud computing is provided. We investigate representative infrastructures of mobile cloud computing and analyze key components. Moreover, emerging MCC models and services are discussed, and challenging issues are identified that will need to be addressed in future work.

FACOR：Flexible Access Control with Outsourceable Revocation in Mobile Clouds

Access control is a key mechanism to secure outsourced data in mobile clouds. Some existing solutions are proposed to enforce flexible access control on outsourced data or reduce the computations performed by mobile devices. However, less attention has been paid to the efficiency of revocation when there are mobile devices needed to be revoked. In this paper, we put forward a new solution, referred to as flexible access control with outsourceable revocation(FACOR) for mobile clouds. The FACOR applies the attribute-based encryption to enable flexible access control on outsourced data, and allows mobile users to outsource the time-consuming encryption and decryption computations to proxies, with only requiring attributes authorization to be fully trusted. As an advantageous feature, FACOR provides an outsourceable revocation for mobile users to reduce the complicated attribute-based revocation operations. The security analysis shows that our FACOR scheme achieves data security against collusion attacks and unauthorized accesses from revoked users. Both theoretical and experimental results confirm that our proposed scheme greatly reliefs the mobile devices from heavy encryption and decryption computations, as well as the complicated revocation of access rights in mobile clouds.

Joint Resource Allocation Using Evolutionary Algorithms in Heterogeneous Mobile Cloud Computing Networks

The problem of joint radio and cloud resources allocation is studied for heterogeneous mobile cloud computing networks. The objective of the proposed joint resource allocation schemes is to maximize the total utility of users as well as satisfy the required quality of service(QoS) such as the end-to-end response latency experienced by each user. We formulate the problem of joint resource allocation as a combinatorial optimization problem. Three evolutionary approaches are considered to solve the problem: genetic algorithm(GA), ant colony optimization with genetic algorithm(ACO-GA), and quantum genetic algorithm(QGA). To decrease the time complexity, we propose a mapping process between the resource allocation matrix and the chromosome of GA, ACO-GA, and QGA, search the available radio and cloud resource pairs based on the resource availability matrixes for ACOGA, and encode the difference value between the allocated resources and the minimum resource requirement for QGA. Extensive simulation results show that our proposed methods greatly outperform the existing algorithms in terms of running time, the accuracy of final results, the total utility, resource utilization and the end-to-end response latency guaranteeing.

Building a Platform to Bridge Low End Mobile Phones and Cloud Computing Services

Two waves of technology are dramatically changing daily life： cloud computing and mobile phones. New cloud computing services such as webmail and content rich data search have emerged. However, in order to use these services, a mobile phone must be able to run new applications and handle high network bandwidth. Worldwide, about 3.45 billion mobile phones are low end phones; they have low bandwidth and cannot run new applications. Because of this technology gap, most mobile users are unable to experience cloud computing services with their thumbs. In this paper, a novel platform, Thumb-in-Cloud, is proposed to bridge this gap. Thumb-in-Cloud consists of two subsystems： Thumb-Machine and Thumb-Gateways. Thumb-Machine is a virtual machine built into a low end phone to enable it to run new applications. Thumb-Gateways can tailor cloud computing services by reformatting and compressing the service to fit the phone ＇ s profile.

Survey on Three Components of Mobile Cloud Computing: Offloading, Distribution and Privacy

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) brings rich computational resource to mobile users, network operators, and cloud computing providers. It can be represented in many ways, and the ultimate goal of MCC is to enable execution of rich mobile application with rich user experience. Mobility is one of the main characteristics of MCC environment where user can be able to continue their work regardless of movement. This literature review paper presents the state-of-the-art survey of MCC. Also, we provide the communication architecture of MCC and taxonomy of mobile cloud in which specifically concentrates on offloading, mobile distribution computing, and privacy. Through an extensive literature review, we found that MCC is a technologically beneficial and expedient paradigm for virtual environments in terms of virtual servers in a distributed environment, multi-tenant architecture and data storing in a cloud. We further identified the drawbacks in offloading, mobile distribution computing, privacy of MCC and how this technology can be used in an effective way.

Dependent task assignment algorithm based on particle swarm optimization and simulated annealing in ad-hoc mobile cloud

In order to solve the problem of efficiently assigning tasks in an ad-hoc mobile cloud( AMC),a task assignment algorithm based on the heuristic algorithm is proposed. The proposed task assignment algorithm based on particle swarm optimization and simulated annealing( PSO-SA) transforms the dependencies between tasks into a directed acyclic graph( DAG) model. The number in each node represents the computation workload of each task and the number on each edge represents the workload produced by the transmission. In order to simulate the environment of task assignment in AMC,mathematical models are developed to describe the dependencies between tasks and the costs of each task are defined. PSO-SA is used to make the decision for task assignment and for minimizing the cost of all devices,which includes the energy consumption and time delay of all devices.PSO-SA also takes the advantage of both particle swarm optimization and simulated annealing by selecting an optimal solution with a certain probability to avoid falling into local optimal solution and to guarantee the convergence speed. The simulation results show that compared with other existing algorithms,the PSO-SA has a smaller cost and the result of PSO-SA can be very close to the optimal solution.

Efficient Video Transmission in D2D Assisted Mobile Cloud Networks

The increasing popularity of smart mobile devices and the rise of online services has increased the requirements for efficient dissemination of social video contents. In this paper,we study the problem of distributing video from cloud server to users in partially connected cooperative D2 D network using network coding. In such a scenario, the transmission conflicts occur from simultaneous transmissions of multiple devices, and the scheduling decision should be made not only on the encoded packets but also on the set of transmitting devices. We analyze the lower bound and give an integer linear formulation of the joint optimization problem over the set of transmitting devices and the packet combinations.We also propose a heuristic solution for this setup using a conflict graph and local graph at every device. Simulation results show that our coding scheme significantly reduces the number of transmission slots, which will increase the efficiency of video delivery.

Adaptive QoS Management for Mobile Cloud Services

The rapid growth of cloud computing and mobile Internet services has triggered the emergence of mobile cloud services. Among many challenges,QoS management is one of the crucial issues for mobile cloud services. However,existing works on QoS management for cloud computing can hardly fit well to the mobile environment. This paper presents a QoS management architecture and an adaptive management process that can predict,assess and ensure QoS of mobile cloud services. Furthermore,we propose an adaptive QoS management model based on Fuzzy Cognitive Maps ( FCM) ,which suitably represents the causal relationships among QoS related properties and cloud service modes. We evaluate the proposed solution and demonstrate its effectiveness and benefits based on simulation work.

Enabling QoE-aware Mobile Cloud Video Recording over Roadside Vehicular Networks

Most of previous video recording devices in mobile vehicles commonly store captured video contents locally. With the rapid development of 4G/Wi Fi networks, there emerges a new trend to equip video recording devices with wireless interfaces to enable video uploading to the cloud for video playback in a later time point. In this paper, we propose a QoE-aware mobile cloud video recording scheme in the roadside vehicular networks, which can adaptively select the proper wireless interface and video bitrate for video uploading to the cloud. To maximize the total utility, we need to design a control strategy to carefully balance the transmission cost and the achieved QoE for users. To this purpose, we investigate the tradeoff between cost incurred by uploading through cellular networks and the achieved QoE of users. We apply the optimization framework to solve the formulated problem and design an online scheduling algorithm. We also conduct extensive trace-driven simulations and our results show that our algorithm achieves a good balance between the transmission cost and user QoE.