Database-as-a-service integration with ad hoc mobile cloud-powered GUISET
The World Wide Web has advanced considerably in the recent years. These advancements have also been expanded to the mobile environments, where mobile devices are now capable of doing most of the operations that were initially intended for traditional computers. Due to the resource poverty situation facing mobile devices, i.e., mobile devices having limited storage capacity, processing and battery power, these advanced capabilities come at a cost. Because of this challenge, computing paradigms such as Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) have been introduced in an attempt to mitigate this challenge. With MCC, most of the processing and storage is moved from the mobile device to the cloud server, thus conserving the device’s resources. For this to be realisable, the presence of an Internet link between the mobile device and the cloud is required. However, due to the fluctuation of wireless links, the always-on Internet connectivity between the cloud and mobile devices is not achievable at all times. The Internet disconnections result in cloud resources being unreachable by the mobile users, which has a negative impact on most applications. In an attempt to mitigate the connectivity outage issue between mobile devices and the cloud, this work proposes the usage of a cache to maintain data availability to mobile clients who were initially using the DBaaS model to store their data. The proposed cache model is used only during Internet disconnections, and uses a prefetching mechanism to periodically retrieve its data from the central cloud. The usability of this model applies in Ad hoc Mobile Clouds (AMC), where a group of disconnected mobile devices collaborate to form a community cloud. Furthermore, the integration of an AMC with the Grid-based Utility Infrastructure for SMME Enabling Technology (GUISET) to achieve smooth running of offline clients is proposed. This work further develops a prototype of the model, and the evaluation results show that our model performs better in terms of maintaining data availability to occasionally disconnected clients.
mobile services --mobile cloud computing --wireless connectivity --grid based utility infrastructure
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