RMCC: Restful Mobile Cloud Computing Framework for Exploiting Adjacent Service-Based Mobile Cloudlets

Mobile devices, especially smartphones are increasingly gaining ground in several domains, particularly healthcare, tele-monitoring, and education to perform Resource-intensive Mobile Applications (RiMA). However, constrained resources, especially CPU and battery hinder their successful adoption. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) aims to augment computational capabilities of resource-constraint mobile devices and conserve their native resources by remotely performing intensive tasks. In typical MCC solutions, intensive tasks are offloaded to distant VM-based cloud data centers or cloudlets whose exploitation originates long WAN latency and/or virtualization overhead degrading RiMA execution efficiency. In this paper, a lightweight Resource-oriented MCC (RMCC) architecture is proposed that exploits resources of plethora of Adjacent Service-based Mobile Cloudlets (ASMobiC) as fine-grained mobile service providers. In RMCC, ASMobiCs host prefabricated Restful services to be asynchronously called by mobile service consumers at runtime. RMCC is a Restful cross-platform architecture functional on major mobile OSs (e.g., Android and iOS) and realizes utilization of the computing resources of off-the-shelve outdated or damaged-yet-functioning mobile devices towards green MCC. Results of benchmarking advocate significant mean time- and energy-saving of 87% and 71.45%, respectively when intensive tasks are executed in ASMobiCs.