MOBILE CLOUD COMPUTING: A
SURVEY OF EMERGING ISSUES AND
FUTURE TRENDS
AMINA RASHID Department of Computer Science
University of Kashmir Srinagar, India [email protected]
JAVED PARVEZ Department of Computer Science
University of Kashmir Srinagar, India
Abstract:
Mobile Cloud Computing represents a paradigm shift. Users can very well access the services which they would normally do on end systems by using handheld devices, tablets, mobile devices. Mobile Cloud Computing is a potential technology for mobile device services, closely related to its users, in which mobile applications are built, powered and hosted using cloud computing technology. Smartphones collect and compile sensitive information and hence are preferred targets, so access must be controlled to protect privacy of user and intellectual property of company. Taking full advantage of this nascent technology, while keeping data secure in the Cloud requires re-architecting (smartphone) mobile applications. Although there has been a rapid rise in the development and sales of mobile devices which include various smartphones, tablets and other handheld devices; there are several security issues which need to be addressed. Security risks are incurred in smartphones and other handheld devices due to the type of mobile communication technology they use and the software hosted by them. In this paper, we present an introduction to mobile cloud computing along with its benefits.
Keywords; Mobility; Cloud Computing; Mobile Cloud Computing; Vulnerabilities 1. Introduction
Cloud computing is a colloquial expression used to describe a variety of different types of computing concepts that involve a large number of computers
Connected through real time communication network [1].Cloud computing architecture is the combination of the components and sub components for cloud computing. These components further consist of, front end platform(which consists of mobile device, thin client, fat client),accompanied by a back end platform(which consists of servers ,storage),a cloud based delivery and network for communication(Internet, Intranet and Cloud).All these components, together make up the cloud computing architecture.
Cloud architectures are developed in on-demand fashion i.e. the resources are dynamically assigned to user according to his request and relinquished after job is done[2][3]. The architecture of a cloud[4] can be described as the systems architecture of software systems involved in delivery of cloud computing, typically involving multiple cloud components communicating with each other over a loose coupling mechanism such as the messaging queue. Elastic provision implies intelligence in use of tight or loose coupling as applied to mechanisms such as these and others.
2. Mobile Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing is recognized as a future generation computing infrastructure, as it offers various advantages which includes allowing users to use infrastructure, software provided by Cloud provided at minimal or low cost. Cloud computing is environment friendly application, as can be seen in energy utilizing calculations as that show opportunities for shifting less efficient firm based data handling tasks to more energy efficient data centers.
With the growth of mobile applications and popularity of cloud computing services and support of cloud computing for mobile users led to the integration of cloud computing into mobile environment, resulting in development of a technology known as mobile cloud computing.
Concept of cloud computing was introduced in 2007, and soon after its conception, concept of mobile cloud computing was introduced as a subset of cloud computing services with the concept of mobility, but it is still considered in its infancy stage. It’s an infrastructure where data and processing could be outside mobile device, making it as good as a dumb terminal. Users are allowed to interact with the help of the interface, wherein the limitations are hidden with respect to storage, computational performance, etc. Together with the rapid growth in mobile applications and cloud computing has been introduced to be a potential technology for mobile services [13].Mobile services have gained speed by emerging cloud computing technologies, as these devices play a vital role in human life as far communication and entertainment is considered.
Mobile cloud computing applications are not restricted to less advanced mobile devices and hence thereby making available to larger set of subscribers. It opens up possibilities for new class of applications by launching applications known as handset centric applications or features and also network related applications.
Mobile cloud computing implements a number of augmentation procedures for leveraging resources and services of cloud data centers. Examples of augmentation strategies include: screen augmentation, energy augmentation, storage augmentation and application processing augmentation of SMD [19].
Mobility and ubiquity are key features of next generation network. Hence, combination of electronic devices like smartphones, PDA’s, ubiquitous mobile network and cloud computing, resources are converging together to emerge as new field of mobile cloud computing [13].
Popularity and usage of mobile cloud computing is endorsed by a study done by Junior Research, which states consumer and enterprise which will be greatly affected by cloud based mobile applications is expected to rise to $9.5 billion by 2014[7].According to ABI research, it is expected by 2015 that more than 240 million business customers will be using cloud computing services through mobile devices, generating a revenue of about $5.2 billion[8].The striking feature that should be noted that in 2008,we only had 42.8 million Mobile Cloud Computing users. This rise in number of Mobile Cloud Computing users very well shows the importance of cloud computing in mobile users [8].
Aepona [9], describes Mobile Cloud Computing as new paradigm for mobile applications where data processing and storage are moved from mobile device to powerful and centralized computing platforms located in clouds.MCC can also defined as a combination of mobile web and cloud computing which is most popular tool for mobile users to access applications and services on internet[10][11].Mobile cloud computing includes numerous mobile devices that are closely related to their users, which are directly involving many cloud activities that extend cloud boundaries into entire cyber physical system. As was predicted by Gartner ,that mobile phones will overtake PC’s as most common Web Access Devices worldwide by 2013[14].
In mobile cloud computing, there are two categories of cloud services: cloud contents and computing power. Cloud content are provided in the form of centralized storage centers or sharing online content ,for example live video streams from other mobile devices. There are a number of online file storage services that are available on cloud server which augment the storage potentials by providing off-device storage services. Examples of cloud storage services include Amazon S3 [20] and Drop Box [21].Mobile users outsource data storage by maintaining data storage on cloud server nodes. Smart Box [22] is online file storage and management model which provides constructive approach for online cloud based storage and access management system.
Computing power of cloud data centers is utilized by outsourcing computational load to cloud server nodes. Mechanism of outsourcing computational task to remote server is called process offloading or cyber foraging. Term cyber foraging is introduced by Satyanarayanan [23] to augment computing potential of wireless mobile devices by exploiting available stationary computers in local environment.
1. pre-processing 2. resizing
3. corner detections
4. augmented reality rendering
The cloud is used to realize routine but large quantity feature comparison Mobile devices are connected to their mobile networks via base stations that are used to establish and control connections and functional interfaces between the respective mobile networks and devices.
Mobile user’s requests for information, this request for information are transmitted to central processors that are connected to servers providing mobile network services.
Mobile network operators provide services to mobile users as AAA, which is for authenticity, authorization, and accounting, based on HA (home agent) and subscribers data stored in databases. After all this, subscriber’s requests are sent to cloud via Internet.
Once requests reach the cloud, cloud controllers process requests to provide mobile users with respective cloud services. The services are developed with the concepts of cloud which include utility computing, virtualization, service oriented architecture (which include web, applications and database servers).
Various examples of mobile cloud computing include Gmail, Google Maps. Still most of calculation and data storage are done on mobile devices and not in cloud.
According to HP DV Labs Cyber Security Risk Report 2012, key findings regarding security challenges are:
1) Non-enterprise infrastructure introduces many new opportunities to exploit:
Concepts like virtualization, cloud computing and especially mobile cloud computing are rich sources of potential security vulnerabilities. Mobile device adoption has quickly outpaced traditional clients; this infrastructure in particular will have huge impact on enterprise security in coming years. Mobile browser exploits and multi-vector compound attacks using browser, SMS, e-mails are appearing more frequently. Inadequate encryption is widespread problem in mobile application services.
2) Great number of overall attacks but declining number of attack vectors:
Vulnerabilities reported in commercial applications declined 19.5% from 2010, creating a false sense of security. Number of high security attacks, as measured by HP Tipping Point Intrusion Protection System, more than doubled in second half of 2011.Hackers is consistently targeting custom applications, especially ones that utilize web.
3) Web-based applications are essentially vulnerable:
4 out of 6 most commonly reported web application security vulnerabilities are exclusively exploited via
web.
Researchers
found that web and cloud based applications generally expose a greater attack surface, making it more likely that a hacker will find exploitable web application vulnerabilities. As a result there were almost 50% more web application attacks in 2011 than in 2010.Security mistakes in web applications are prevalent and widespread, even in large enterprises within an active mobile application security program in place.3. Convergence Of Media And Mobility
Mobile technology developments do not drive application, but rather are driven by the need for new mobile services that fit the needs and also the demands of users. Mobile information is no longer a novelty, but rather a ubiquitous phenomenon [15].
Convergence of media and mobility is creating new commercial opportunities, giving rise to new technology challenges. Some of which include [16]:
1. Creating speech recognition systems that are robust to surrounding noisy environments
2. Robust image features and matching methods suitable for mobile devices searching through large amount of unstructured and semi-structured multimedia data.
3. Understanding variety of inquiries from keywords to natural language questions.
4. Securing information access, summarizing multimedia search results and personalizing user interface to more easily adapt to preferences and context.
4. Advantages of Mobile Cloud Computing
The miniature nature, compact design, high quality graphics, customized user applications support and multimodal connectivity features have made Smart Mobile Devices(SMD’s) a special choice of interest for mobile users. SMD’s incorporate computing potentials of PDA’s and voice communication [18].
1. Extending battery lifetime:
CPU performance, large screen size result into huge power consumption. This problem can be resolved by either having less screen size and increasing additional hardware. Decreasing screen size will lead to less visibility of texts/images used to view on the device. Additional hardware will lead to increase in cost of device. Computation offloading technique used in mobile cloud computing is proposed to migrate large computations and complex processing from resource limited devices(mobile devices) to resourceful machines(clouds).Hence, avoiding long execution time of application, resulting in less amount of power consumption.
2. Improving data storage capacity and processing power:
Storage capacity has always being a major constraint for mobile devices MCC is developed to enable mobile users to store/access large data on cloud through wireless networks. Facebook is most successful social network application today, and it is a typical example of using cloud in sharing images [12].
3. Reliability:
The data is stored on clouds and even applications are executed in clouds, improves reliability as both data and applications are stored, backed up on number of computers. Hence, this reduces the chances of data being lost due to failure of devices or other factors. MCC can be designed as a comprehensive data security model for both service providers and users.
4. Dynamic Provisioning:
Dynamic on-demand provisioning enables mobile users to run their applications on clouds without prior reservation of the resources.
5. Scalability:
Can scale up to meet the dynamic user demands due to flexible provisioning of resources. Hence, we can add up users and service without or with little constraint.
6. Integration:
We can easily integrate services from different service providers through use of cloud and internet. 7. Security:
Centralized monitoring of data leads to more secure data.
5. Applications of Mobile Cloud Computing
Mobile applications have gained advantages due to the introduction of mobile cloud computing. Hence, policies for education and training will get affected because skills needed for cloud are in demand, especially in short term as lower entry barriers encourage the entry of new firms that will utilize cloud skills.
Services account for more than half of US economy. Services computing has become across discipline that covers science and technology of services innovation research and engineering and leverages business solutions, scientific applications, and modernized services. [17]
A. Mobile Commerce:
Mobile Commerce is business model for commerce using mobile devices. The m-commerce applications fulfil some tasks that require mobility which include mobile transactions, payments, ticketing. M-commerce faces various difficulties e.g. low network bandwidth, complexity of mobile devices configurations, security.
B. Mobile Learning:
Initially e-learning became the trend, now due to introduction of cloud, mobile learning has become the trend introduced in various campuses. Mobile learning or m-learning applications have limitations in terms of cost of devices and network dependence, transmission rate.
C. Mobile Gaming:
Gaming applications generate large revenues for service providers. Mobile gaming m-gaming is regarded potential market for generating revenues. M-gaming uses the offload technique, wherein all computation is done on the cloud server, and gamers only interact with the interface on their mobile devices and in turn reducing power consumption due to the heavy graphics and computation.
6. Issues And Challenges
1. Architecture:
A reference architecture need to be constructed for various heterogeneous mobile cloud computing environment is the need of the hour for fully utilizing or exploiting the power of mobile cloud computing.
2. Protocol Design:
Due to the frequent transmissions between front end (mobile users) and back end (servers, storage), and random nature of networks especially of wireless networks, design of transmission control protocol should be careful.
3. Context Issues:
There can be identified two separate traits of handheld devices, context aware and socially aware. Hence, there is an essential need to achieve vision of mobile cloud computing among heterogeneous network and computing devices.
4. Virtual Machine:
Mobile cloud computing is done in various devices by a technique known as offloading, which means executing such applications which are resource exhaustive via virtual machine, involves encapsulating of application in virtual machine instance and migrating to cloud for execution. This is a very challenging task due to additional overhead of deploying and managing virtual machine on mobile devices.
5. Handheld Devices:
There are serious limitations that are imposed in computing capability and energy resource of handheld devices to set up complex applications. Compared to PCs and laptops, mobile devices like iPhones, Androids and Windows reduce processing power capabilities by 3times,memory by 5-6 times, bandwidth by 10 times[13].These differences pose a serious limitation to mobile cloud computing.
6. Service:
Service in mobile cloud computing still remains questionable due to the ever changing data transfer rate and discontinuous connection, as the internet service provider is normally away from mobile device users.
Latency delay period is calculated to be 200milliseconds compared to vast difference compared to wired network where it is calculated to be just 50milliseconds[13].In addition to this weather conditions can also affect the quality of service provided by mobile cloud computing.
Conclusion
Mobile cloud computing will lead to huge traffic over the network, which can also be attributed to the radical increase in the number of mobile devices ,which in turn will result into bandwidth related issues, stage will come where bandwidth might get exhausted, hence limiting bandwidth, which will further lead to poor quality service.
Mobile cloud computing introduces high potential risk to data as it the hackers can easily hack the data on internet ,rather if the same was maintained on a local server ,incurring additional hardware costs ,but saving data integrity.
Mobile cloud computing connects almost every available device which is connecting to internet and making possible to integrate information in cloud, thereby helping in creating information systems, which can be further used for decision making by appropriate warehouse techniques.
Mobile cloud computing will lead to various job related opportunities. The main target area of mobile cloud computing will be the fast growing sectors which include smartphones, which constantly pace up with the demand of users, to make interaction via these systems more friendly .It has been estimated that in Germany, from 2010 to 2014 the rate of growth for cloud related jobs will be 280% for Smartphone services. Although, cloud related jobs are expected to occur due to mobile cloud computing, but there is a risk of net unemployment caused by investing in cloud. The future of various sectors will be mainly decided by mobile cloud computing.
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