Foreword
Today personal computing devices such as smart phones and tablets have become the most popular means to access the Internet. They feature processing, storage, and communications power that increase exponentially, almost doubling each year. They are also equipped with a growing number of sensors, making them ideal for environmental monitoring, activity recognition and recording, health monitoring, navigation, and social match making. However, many emerging applications require independent, personal devices to coordinate the inputs, e.g., to analyze photos from a variety of cameras or to route data through multiple radios. Enabling these applications will require new services for efficient and secure sharing of data and resources.
Equally impressive has been the evolution of another utility, the vehicle, from its function as a basic means of transport to that of a sophisticated sensor platform. On-board vehicular routers have enormous processing, storage, and communication resources. Vehicle processing and communications resources coupled with sophisticated lasers, infrared sensors, and cameras have brought us the autonomous driving cars. In this area, a major contribution has been to intelligent transport by facilitating cruise control, detecting pedestrians, and assisting impaired drivers. Even bigger gains are expected from Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications, e.g., informing other vehicles of road conditions ahead, exchanging pedestrian sightings and collaborating to resolve congestion.
These examples are a part of a growing trend in mobile computing. Technologies are leading to a shift away from a backbone centric Internet scenario (in which personal and vehicular platforms communicate exclusively with the Internet Cloud), towards a mobile Internet dominated by mobile node interactions. Keeping the data local produces two important benefits – reducing wireless access traffic and easing Internet Cloud load. It is appropriate then to view a cluster of collaborating mobile devices as a Mobile Computing Cloud (MCC). One can borrow from the Internet Cloud the notion of “service”, initially provided to local cloud members only, but now extensible to Internet customers as well. The Mobile Computing Cloud shares one aspect with the Internet Cloud: the access to massive resources (storage, processing, communications, and applications). However, resources are scattered over heterogeneous, and often intermittently connected, personal and vehicular platforms. They cannot be aggregated and harnessed for supercomputer type computations. This scattering of resources is a major challenge in MCCs. On the other hand, pervasiveness and mobility are also their main assets: mobility makes the MCCs the ideal observatories over the physical world in which they operate.
Given the phenomenal growth of Mobile Data and Mobile Applications, there is no question that Mobile Cloud Computing will be one of the fastest growing themes in Mobile Internet research and development. While there are many excellent articles and books that cover Mobile Computing platforms, protocols, security and applications in depth as separate topics, it is far more difficult to find a comprehensive source of information that captures and interrelates the various components together in a consistent way. The Book “Mobile Cloud Computing: Foundations and Service Models” by Dijiang Huang and Huijun Wu takes on the challenge of providing a unified view of Mobile Cloud Computing design from Foundation to Services. The book is appropriate for beginners as it goes through the various steps of the MCC design. It is also very valuable for practitioners, for its ample references and implementation examples.
The book is organized in three parts. Part 1 covers the fundamentals. After an extremely helpful taxonomy, mobile platforms including iOS and Android are introduced, and computation offloading, the most popular mobile cloud service, is described. Next, Virtualization is introduced as the most important enabling technology for mobility. Besides virtualization concepts developed for the Internet Cloud such as computation, network, storage virtualization and Hypervisor, Mobile device virtualization techniques (e.g., BYOD and KVM over ARM) are presented. Finally, MCC service models are described, starting as usual from Internet Cloud services – (IaaS), (PaaS), (SaaS) – and moving next to existing mobile cloud service models with plenty of use-case examples, and concluding with mobile IoT microservices.
Part 2 reports on current research and development of mobile cloud computing leveraging the author's own work, in particular POEM, an open service framework based on OSGi and XMPP and offering an offloading and composition system for MCCs. Next, offloading is defined as an optimization problem (to minimize energy and latency) and it is solved using a mobile cloud directed acyclic graph model. Finally, service offloading/composition is tested on several MCC application scenarios including hedge and fog platforms. Noteworthy is the service demonstration on IOT microservice platforms for popular use cases like personal health management, smart building, and platooning of autonomous vehicles.
Part 3 is dedicated to security. First, Access Control is demonstrated using ABE (Attribute Based Encryption) and is illustrated on an Information Centric Networking (ICN) naming scheme and a secure offloading application. Next, a secure BYOD solution based on KVM-based virtualization of ARM devices is presented. Two essential components are hardware assisted virtualization and Open vSwitch. An SDN remote controller is used to provide SDN functionalities.
The four Appendices cover advanced topics of significant interest to implementers. The Cloud resource management section provides an excellent survey on management techniques in the Internet Cloud. It is contrasted to mobile cloud management of mobile resources, still in its infancy, but nonetheless critical. The Mobile Cloud Programming Platform is an initiative by the authors to develop a platform based on XMPP and OSGi compatible with the existing mobile OS implementation. If offers a valid open environment for developers with excellent example illustration. Cryptographic Constructions covers the theoretical aspects of ABE and together with the Part 3 section makes the topic self-contained in the book. The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) section complements the Part 1 BYOD coverage with an interesting implementation and evaluation.
Hopefully, I have successfully highlighted the content of this book and convinced you to examine it personally. Practicing mobile computing engineers as well as beginners will enjoy and benefit from this reading as much as I did.