Understanding performance modeling for modular mobile-cloud applications

Mobile devices are becoming the main entry points to the growing number of cloud applications and services. Unlike traditional approaches, we pursue a flexible architectural model where cloud hosted applications are distributed between mobile devices and the cloud in a bid to improve interaction performance. Given the increasing variety of mobile platforms or virtual instances, in this paper we approach the problem of estimating performance for such applications in two steps. First, we identify the factors that impact interaction response times, such as the application distribution schemes, workload sizes and intensities, or the resource variations of the mobile-cloud setup. Second, we attempt to find correlations between these factors and to understand how to build a unified and generic performance estimation model.