Mobile Edge Cloud: Opportunities and Challenges

Mobile edge cloud is emerging as a promising technology to the internet of things and cyber-physical system applications such as smart home and intelligent video surveillance. In a smart home, various sensors are deployed to monitor the home environment and physiological health of individuals. The data collected by sensors are sent to an application, where numerous algorithms for emotion and sentiment detection, activity recognition and situation management are applied to provide healthcare- and emergency-related services and to manage resources at the home. The executions of these algorithms require a vast amount of computing and storage resources. To address the issue, the conventional approach is to send the collected data to an application on an internet cloud. This approach has several problems such as high communication latency, communication energy consumption and unnecessary data traffic to the core network. To overcome the drawbacks of the conventional cloud-based approach, a new system called mobile edge cloud is proposed. In mobile edge cloud, multiple mobiles and stationary devices interconnected through wireless local area networks are combined to create a small cloud infrastructure at a local physical area such as a home. Compared to traditional mobile distributed computing systems, mobile edge cloud introduces several complex challenges due to the heterogeneous computing environment, heterogeneous and dynamic network environment, node mobility, and limited battery power. The real-time requirements associated with the internet of things and cyber-physical system applications make the problem even more challenging. In this paper, we describe the applications and challenges associated with the design and development of mobile edge cloud system and propose an architecture based on a cross layer design approach for effective decision making.Comment: 4th Annual Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence, December 14-16, 2017, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1810.0704

An Energy-Efficient Resource Management System for a Mobile Ad Hoc Cloud

Recently, mobile ad hoc clouds have emerged as a promising technology for mobile cyber-physical system applications, such as mobile intelligent video surveillance and smart homes. Resource management plays a key role in maximizing resource utilization and application performance in mobile ad hoc clouds. Unlike resource management in traditional distributed computing systems, such as clouds, resource management in a mobile ad hoc cloud poses numerous challenges owing to the node mobility, limited battery power, high latency, and the dynamic network environment. The real-time requirements associated with mobile cyber-physical system applications make the problem even more challenging. Currently, existing resource management systems for mobile ad hoc clouds are not designed to support mobile cyber-physical system applications and energy-efficient communication between application tasks. In this paper, we propose a new energy-efficient resource management system for mobile ad hoc clouds. The proposed system consists of two layers: a network layer and a middleware layer. The network layer provides ad hoc network and communication services to the middleware layer and shares the collected information in order to allow efficient and robust resource management decisions. It uses (1) a transmission power control mechanism to improve energy efficiency and network capacity, (2) link lifetimes to reduce communication and energy consumption costs, and (3) link quality to estimate data transfer times. The middleware layer is responsible for the discovery, monitoring, migration, and allocation of resources. It receives application tasks from users and allocates tasks to nodes on the basis of network and node-level information.Comment: 19 Page