An Online Migration Environment for Executing Mobile Applications on the Cloud

Modern smart phones have made many pervasive computing dreams come true. Still, many mobile applications do not perform well due to the shortage of resources for computation, data storage, network bandwidth, and battery capacity. While such applications can be re-designed with client-server models to benefit from cloud services, the users are no longer in full control of the application, which has become a serious concern. We proposed a cloud/mobile execution framework to execute mobile applications in a cloud-based virtualized execution environment controlled by mobile applications and users, with encryption and isolation to protect against eavesdropping from cloud providers. We have developed efficient schemes for migrating applications and synchronizing data between execution environments. We also addressed the communication issues in the virtualization execution environment with probabilistic communication Quality-of-Service (QoS) technique to support timely application migration.