MAP: Mobile Assistance Platform with a VM Type Selection Ability

The usage of remote compute and storage resources is becoming popular to assist mobile devices. However, existing frameworks that support mobile client/server applications do not consider the provision of resources in a large scale. Although a cloud-based infrastructure may provide a large number of resources on demand, most cloud offerings do not provide the right level of abstraction to assist mobile devices. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings are too complex to set up on demand and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings are not flexible enough regarding Quality-of-Service (QoS) adjustment. To overcome these issues, we propose a middleware named Mobile Assistance Platform (MAP), which serves as an extended PaaS layer. It provides an on-demand execution platform for program code, but with the additional ability to select the underlying VM quality for execution. Furthermore, each mobile request is assigned to a single VM instance for processing. MAP provides configurable compute resources for mobile users in a large scale. For this demo, we have set up MAP on the Amazon EC2 infrastructure and we present two mobile applications that can benefit from the on-demand resource quality selection.