MCC-OSGi: An OSGi-based mobile cloud service model

In this article, a new mobile Cloud service model is presented. It offers a dynamic and efficient remote access to information services and resources for mobile devices. Mobile Cloud computing has been evolved as a distributed service model, where individual mobile users are Cloud service providers. Compared to traditional Internet-centric Cloud service models, the complexity of mobile service management in a dynamic and distributed service environment is increased dramatically. To address this challenge, we propose to establish an OSGi-based mobile Cloud service model — MCC-OSGi — that uses OSGi Bundles as the basic mobile Cloud service building components. The proposed solution supports OSGi bundles running on both mobile devices and Cloud-side virtual machine OS platforms, and the bundles can be transferred and run on different platforms without compatibility issues. The presented solution is achieved: 1) by incorporating OSGi into Android software development platform, 2) by setting up a Remote-OSGi on the Cloud and on mobile devices, and 3) by defining three service architecture models. The presented solution is validated through a demonstrative application with relevant performance measurements.