When Mobile Blockchain Meets Edge Computing

Blockchain, as the backbone technology of the current popular Bitcoin digital currency, has become a promising decentralized data management framework. Although blockchain has been widely adopted in many applications, e.g., finance, healthcare, and logistics, its application in mobile services is still limited. This is due to the fact that blockchain users need to solve preset proof-of-work puzzles to add new data, i.e., a block, to the blockchain. Solving the proof-of-work, however, consumes substantial resources in terms of CPU time and energy, which is not suitable for resource-limited mobile devices. To facilitate blockchain applications in future mobile Internet of Things systems, multiple access mobile edge computing appears to be an auspicious solution to solve the proof-of-work puzzles for mobile users. We first introduce a novel concept of edge computing for mobile blockchain. Then, we introduce an economic approach for edge computing resource management. Moreover, a prototype of mobile edge computing enabled blockchain systems is presented with experimental results to justify the proposed concept.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Communications Magazin

Mobile Agents for Mobile Tourists: A User Evaluation of Gulliver's Genie

How mobile computing applications and services may be best designed, implemented and deployed remains the subject of much research. One alternative approach to developing software for mobile users that is receiving increasing attention from the research community is that of one based on intelligent agents. Recent advances in mobile computing technology have made such an approach feasible. We present an overview of the design and implementation of an archetypical mobile computing application, namely that of an electronic tourist guide. This guide is unique in that it comprises a suite of intelligent agents that conform to the strong intentional stance. However, the focus of this paper is primarily concerned with the results of detailed user evaluations conducted on this system. Within the literature, comprehensive evaluations of mobile context-sensitive systems are sparse and therefore, this paper seeks, in part, to address this deficiency

SAMI: Service-Based Arbitrated Multi-Tier Infrastructure for Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the state-ofthe- art mobile computing technology aims to alleviate resource poverty of mobile devices. Recently, several approaches and techniques have been proposed to augment mobile devices by leveraging cloud computing. However, long-WAN latency and trust are still two major issues in MCC that hinder its vision. In this paper, we analyze MCC and discuss its issues. We leverage Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to propose an arbitrated multi-tier infrastructure model named SAMI for MCC. Our architecture consists of three major layers, namely SOA, arbitrator, and infrastructure. The main strength of this architecture is in its multi-tier infrastructure layer which leverages infrastructures from three main sources of Clouds, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), and MNOs' authorized dealers. On top of the infrastructure layer, an arbitrator layer is designed to classify Services and allocate them the suitable resources based on several metrics such as resource requirement, latency and security. Utilizing SAMI facilitate development and deployment of service-based platform-neutral mobile applications.Comment: 6 full pages, accepted for publication in IEEE MobiCC'12 conference, MobiCC 2012:IEEE Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing, Beijing, Chin