Directory-based incentive management services for ad-hoc mobile clouds

Mobile cloud computing is envisioned as a promising approach to augment the computational capabilities of mobile devices for emerging resource-intensive mobile applications. This augmentation is generally achieved through the capabilities of stationary resources in cloud data centers. However, these resources are mostly not free and sometimes not available. Mobile devices are becoming powerful day by day and can form a self-organizing mobile ad-hoc network of nearby devices and offer their resources as on-demand services to available nodes in the network. In the ad-hoc mobile cloud, devices can move after consuming or providing services to one another. During this process, the problem of incentives arises for a node to provide service to another device (or other devices) in the network, which ultimately decreases the motivation of the mobile device to form an ad-hoc mobile cloud. To solve this problem, we propose a directory-based architecture that keeps track of the retribution and reward valuations (in terms of energy saved and consumed) for devices even after they move from one ad-hoc environment to another. From simulation results, we infer that this framework increases the motivation for mobile devices to form a self-organizing proximate mobile cloud network and to share their resources in the network

VirtFogSim: A parallel toolbox for dynamic energy-delay performance testing and optimization of 5G Mobile-Fog-Cloud virtualized platforms

It is expected that the pervasive deployment of multi-tier 5G-supported Mobile-Fog-Cloudtechnological computing platforms will constitute an effective means to support the real-time execution of future Internet applications by resource- and energy-limited mobile devices. Increasing interest in this emerging networking-computing technology demands the optimization and performance evaluation of several parts of the underlying infrastructures. However, field trials are challenging due to their operational costs, and in every case, the obtained results could be difficult to repeat and customize. These emergingMobile-Fog-Cloud ecosystems still lack, indeed, customizable software tools for the performance simulation of their computing-networking building blocks. Motivated by these considerations, in this contribution, we present VirtFogSim. It is aMATLAB-supported software toolbox that allows the dynamic joint optimization and tracking of the energy and delay performance of Mobile-Fog-Cloud systems for the execution of applications described by general Directed Application Graphs (DAGs). In a nutshell, the main peculiar features of the proposed VirtFogSim toolbox are that: (i) it allows the joint dynamic energy-aware optimization of the placement of the application tasks and the allocation of the needed computing-networking resources under hard constraints on acceptable overall execution times, (ii) it allows the repeatable and customizable simulation of the resulting energy-delay performance of the overall system; (iii) it allows the dynamic tracking of the performed resource allocation under time-varying operational environments, as those typically featuring mobile applications; (iv) it is equipped with a user-friendly Graphic User Interface (GUI) that supports a number of graphic formats for data rendering, and (v) itsMATLAB code is optimized for running atop multi-core parallel execution platforms. To check both the actual optimization and scalability capabilities of the VirtFogSim toolbox, a number of experimental setups featuring different use cases and operational environments are simulated, and their performances are compared