Dynamic Deployment and Cost-Sensitive Provisioning for Elastic Mobile Cloud Services

As mobile customers gradually occupying the largest share of cloud service users, the effective and cost-sensitive provisioning of mobile cloud services quickly becomes a main theme in cloud computing. The key issues involved are much more than just enabling mobile users to access remote cloud resources through wireless networks. The resource limited and intermittent disconnection problems of mobile environments have intrinsic conflict with the continuous connection assumption of the cloud service usage patterns. We advocate that seamless service provisioning in mobile cloud can only be achieved with full exploitation of all available resources around mobile users. An elastic framework is proposed to automatically and dynamically deploy cloud services on data center, base stations, client units, even peer devices. The best deployment location is dynamically determined based on a context-aware and cost-sensitive evaluation model. To facilitate easy adoption of the proposed framework, a service development model and associated semi-automatic tools are provided such that cloud service developers can easily convert a service for execution on different platforms without porting. Prototype implementation and evaluation on the Google Cloud and Android platforms demonstrate that our mechanism can successfully maintain seamless services with very low overhead.