A Self-Stabilizing Process for Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile computing provides benefits of mobility, convenience and convergence. However, mobile devices have limited computing power and resources. An effective approach to remedying the problem is for mobile apps to subscribe cloud services, called Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC). However, there exist two potential problems in MCC, low quality of service (QoS) and limited manageability. Managing MCC is challenging mainly due to performance degradation due to the network-based service invocations, dynamism caused by mobility, high heterogeneity on mobile platforms and services and the overhead for managing various elements of MCC which are highly distributed in nature. To provide a comprehensive and practical solution for MCC, in this paper, we propose a self-stabilizing process and its management-related methods. We first define an extended meta-model of MCC with self-stabilizing related elements. And, we define a main process for self-stabilization and a supplementary process of optimal clustering. We conduct experiments with the proposed process and methods, and the result shows that the self-stabilization and its methods are effective in stabilizing MCC in presence of QoS degradation and severe resource drains.