Trust in Mobile Cloud Computing with LTE-based Deployment

The cloud-computing paradigm has become a standard for on-demand and scalable storage and computation capabilities. Merging the elasticity of the clouds with mobile computing produces mobile cloud computing, which enhances many aspects, such as battery lifetime, performance and bandwidth. Cloudlets are resourceful computational units that provide cloud-computing services to mobile devices. Before mobile cloud computing can be widely adopted and deployed, security, privacy and trust barriers must be addressed. One of the main issues is whether a mobile user should trust a cloudlet provider. In cloud computing, cloud users trust their cloud providers, which tend to be large organisations with reputation to maintain. In mobile cloud computing, however, a cloudlet could be hosted on an LTE small base-station, known as a femtocell, owned by a small business or an individual. This paper presents a trust management scheme that allows mobile users to utilize cloud computing through trusted mobile cloud providers. The simulation of the trust management scheme shows the feasibility of our work.