Gazing into the Crystal Ball: When the Future Internet Meets the Mobile Clouds

The latest advances in mobile devices and the widespread diffusion of networked objects are driving the evolution of traditional Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) systems toward a new framework where storage, computing, sensing, and other device capabilities are offered as a service at the network edge. This visionary scenario, encompassing heterogeneous resources generated, shared, and consumed everywhere in the network, requires innovative architectural and protocol design. In this context, can the approaches recently formulated in the Future Internet research arena (e.g., middleware-based virtualization, Information Centric Networking, and Software-Defined Networking/Network Function Virtualization) support the evolution of mobile cloud systems? This paper provides an affirmative answer by proposing Future-MCC, a novel architecture that capitalizes on such promising approaches and re-thinks (when needed) their philosophy to better fit the evolution of MCC systems. The performance of Future-MCC has been investigated in a representative heterogeneous and dynamic Smart City scenario. Computer simulation results clearly demonstrate that the proposed solution ensures (i) a reduction of the bandwidth requirements spanning from 66 to 91 percent and (ii) an average energy saving equal to 99 percent with respect to a conventional cloud computing platform.