The cloud personal assistant for providing services to mobile clients

This paper introduces the original concept of a cloud personal assistant, a cloud service that manages the access of mobile clients to cloud services. The cloud personal assistant works in the cloud on behalf of its owner: it discovers services, invokes them, stores the results and history, and delivers the results to the mobile user immediately or when the user requests them. Preliminary experimental results that demonstrate the concept are included

Mobile cloud contextual awareness with the cloud personal assistant

This paper presents our efforts to bridge the gap between mobile context awareness, and mobile cloud services, using the Cloud Personal Assistant (CPA). The CPA is a part of the Context Aware Mobile Cloud Services (CAMCS) middleware, which we continue to develop. Specifically, we discuss the development and evaluation of the Context Processor component of this middleware. This component collects context data from the mobile devices of users, which is then provided to the CPA of each user, for use with mobile cloud services. We discuss the architecture and implementation of the Context Processor, followed by the evaluation. We introduce context profiles for the CPA, which influence its operation by using different context types. As part of the evaluation, we present two experimental context-aware mobile cloud services to illustrate how the CPA works with user context, and related context profiles, to complete tasks for the user

User experience of mobile cloud applications - current state and future directions

The increasing penetration rate of feature rich mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets in the global population has resulted in a large number of applications and services being created or modified to support mobile devices. Mobile cloud computing is a proposed paradigm to address the resource scarcity of mobile devices in the face of demand for more computing intensive tasks. Several approaches have been proposed to confront the challenges of mobile cloud computing, but none has used the user experience as the primary focus point. In this paper we evaluate these approaches in respect of the user experience, propose what future research directions in this area require to provide for this crucial aspect, and introduce our own solution

Integrating mobile and cloud resources management using the cloud personal assistant

The mobile cloud computing model promises to address the resource limitations of mobile devices, but effectively implementing this model is difficult. Previous work on mobile cloud computing has required the user to have a continuous, high-quality connection to the cloud infrastructure. This is undesirable and possibly infeasible, as the energy required on the mobile device to maintain a connection, and transfer sizeable amounts of data is large; the bandwidth tends to be quite variable, and low on cellular networks. The cloud deployment itself needs to efficiently allocate scalable resources to the user as well. In this paper, we formulate the best practices for efficiently managing the resources required for the mobile cloud model, namely energy, bandwidth and cloud computing resources. These practices can be realised with our mobile cloud middleware project, featuring the Cloud Personal Assistant (CPA). We compare this with the other approaches in the area, to highlight the importance of minimising the usage of these resources, and therefore ensure successful adoption of the model by end users. Based on results from experiments performed with mobile devices, we develop a no-overhead decision model for task and data offloading to the CPA of a user, which provides efficient management of mobile cloud resources

Context aware mobile cloud services: a user experience oriented middleware for mobile cloud computing

Existing research on implementing the mobile cloud computing paradigm is typically based on offloading demanding computation from mobile devices to cloud-based servers. A continuous, high quality connection to the cloud infrastructure is normally required, with frequent high-volume data transfer, which can have a detrimental impact on the user experience of the application or service. In this paper, the Context Aware Mobile Cloud Services (CAMCS) middleware is presented as a solution that can deliver an integrated user experience of the mobile cloud to users. Such an experience respects the resource limitations of the mobile device. This is achieved by the Cloud Personal Assistant (CPA), the user’s trusted representative within CAMCS, which completes user-assigned tasks using existing cloud-based services, with an asynchronous, disconnected approach. A thin client mobile application, the CAMCS Client, allows the mobile user to send descriptions of tasks to his/her CPA, and view task results saved at the CPA, when convenient. The design and implementation of the middleware is presented, along with results of experimental evaluation on Amazon EC2. The resource usage of the CAMCS client is also studied. Analysis shows that CAMCS delivers an integrated user experience of mobile cloud applications and services

An adaptive task scheduler for a cloud of drones

Drones are now being widely used in different civilian applications, such as delivering shipments to consumers, as proposed by Amazon, and providing internet access to users, as offered by Facebook and Google. Drones can also contribute in emergencies by helping to find victims in places that are not reachable by rescuers, as well as assisting emergency centers to better manage a reported emergency. However, drones have a short flying time due to limited battery life. Therefore, a reliable strategy that minimizes energy consumption and uses collaborative working is required in order to increase drones' ability to operate for longer periods in emergency situations. This paper presents an adaptive task scheduler that allows tasks to be shared/transferred among the drones in a cloud of drones, in order to extend the operational time, achieve faster task execution and, at the same time, reduce the usage of each drone's resources. The ultimate result is an extension of battery life that leads to longer flying and service time for individual drones

Mobile and Ambient Environments of the Future - Research Challenges for Wireless Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks

There are two important trends that seem to be the driving forces in the evolution of communication networks. On the one hand, mobility support becomes a "must" for emerging services and technologies. On the other hand, services tend to have a ubiquitous nature, they are based on intelligent devices being embedded in the ambient environment surroundig us. These new trends result in new research challenges as well. In this paper we first present the specificities of wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks, technologies that were developed to support these new requirements. Then, we highlight the most important and most challenging issues that arise from these specificities