A Mobile Cloud Middleware to Support Mobility and Cloud Interoperability

With the recent advances in cloud computing and the improvement in the capabilities of mobile devices in terms of speed, storage, and computing power, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is emerging as one of important branches of cloud computing. MCC is an extension of cloud computing with the support of mobility. In this paper, the authors first present the specific concerns and key challenges in mobile cloud computing. They then discuss the different approaches to tackle the main issues in MCC that have been introduced so far, and finally focus on describing the proposed overall architecture of a middleware that will contribute to providing mobile users data storage and processing services based on their mobile devices capabilities, availability, and usage. A prototype of the middleware is developed and three scenarios are described to demonstrate how the middleware performs in adapting the provision of cloud web services by transforming SOAP messages to REST and XML format to JSON, in optimizing the results by extracting relevant information, and in improving the availability by caching. Initial analysis shows that the mobile cloud middleware improves the quality of service for mobiles, and provides lightweight responses for mobile cloud services.