Wukong: Toward a Cloud-Oriented File Service for Mobile Devices

Along with the rapid growth of heterogeneous cloud services and network technologies, more mobile devices use cloud storage services to enlarge the capacity and share data in our daily lives. We commonly use cloud storage service clients in a straight forward fashion, since we may easily obtain most client-side software from many services providers. However, when more devices and users participate in heterogeneous services, the difficulty increases to manage these services efficiently and conveniently. In this paper we design and implement a novel cloud-oriented file service, Wukong, which provides a user-friendly and highly-available facilitative data access method for mobile devices in cloud settings. By using the innovative storage abstraction layer and a set of optimization strategies, Wukong supports heterogeneous services with a relatively high performance. By evaluating a prototype in a systematic way on the aspects of the supporting interface, system performance, and the system resource cost, we find that this easily operable file service has a high usability and extensibility. It costs about 50 to 150 lines of code to implement a new backend service supporting plugin. Wukong achieves an acceptable throughput of 179.11 KB/s in an ADSL environment and 80.68 KB/s under a country EVDO 3G network with negligible overhead.