Improving networking performance in virtual mobile clouds

Mobile cloud computing uses cloud techniques for data storage and processing on behalf of mobile customers. It mitigates the mobile devices limitations in terms of battery and processing capacities. Virtualization is levereged in mobile clouds to enhance resource availability. However, it introduces an overhead that significantly harms the applications responsiveness. In this paper we propose an architecture for a mobile cloud where the mobile devices as well as the access network equipments are integrated in the cloud infrastructure through virtualization. The proposed architecture is enhanced with a novel scheme for network I/O virtualization. Through experimental performance evaluation, we show that our proposal considerably improves mobile devices networking performance in terms of delay and bandwidth when accessing virtual resources in the cloud.