An experimental Analysis on Cloud-based Mobile Augmentation in Mobile Cloud Computing

Recent consumer electronic technologies have created momentous ground for smartphones in various domains, particularly healthcare and education. However, smartphones' miniature nature imposes intrinsic limitations on computational capabilities and battery lifetime that encumber performing Resource-intensive Mobile Applications (RMAs). Cloud-based Mobile Augmentation (CMA) is the-state-of-the art augmentation model that leverages proximate and distant clouds to increase, enhance, and optimize computing capabilities of mobile devices aiming at execution of RMAs, which breeds Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC). This study analyzes impacts of mobile-cloud distance and number of intermediate hops — as influential factors — on CMA performance which are not yet investigated. The results indicate the correlation between distance and intermediate hops on overall execution costs (time and energy) of RMAs. The mathematical modeling and benchmarking unveil that distance has negligible impact on latency, whereas intermediate hops increment and communication overhead significantly degrade application performance and complicate energy and time estimation in CMA system

近年来，消费电子技术为智能手机在诸多领域奠定了重要发展基石，尤其在医疗保健与教育两大领域。然而，智能手机的小型化特性使其计算能力与电池续航存在固有局限性，这极大阻碍了资源密集型移动应用（Resource-intensive Mobile Applications，RMAs）的运行。基于云的移动增强（Cloud-based Mobile Augmentation，CMA）作为当前最先进的增强模型，通过利用近端与远端云资源来提升并优化移动设备的计算能力，以支持资源密集型移动应用的运行为目标，该技术也催生了移动云计算（Mobile Cloud Computing，MCC）这一技术分支。本研究针对尚未得到充分探索的两个关键影响因素——移动云间距离与中间跳数——对基于云的移动增强（CMA）性能的影响展开分析。研究结果表明，移动云间距离与中间跳数会对资源密集型移动应用的整体执行成本（时间与能耗）产生关联影响。通过数学建模与基准测试发现，移动云间距离对延迟的影响微乎其微，但中间跳数的增加与通信开销会显著降低应用性能，并使得基于云的移动增强（CMA）系统中的能耗与时间估算更为复杂。