Towards a Formal Approach to Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is an emerging paradigm to transparently provide support for demanding tasks on resource-constrained mobile devices by relying on the integration with remote cloud services. Research in this field is tackling the multiple conceptual and technical challenges (e.g., how and when to offload) that are hindering the full realization of MCC. The NAM framework is a general tool to describe networks of hardware and software autonomic entities, providing or consuming services or resources, that can be applied to MCC scenarios. In this paper, we focus on NAM's features related to the key aspects of MCC, in particular those concerning code mobility capabilities and autonomic offloading strategies. Our first contribution is the definition of a restricted set of mobility actions supporting MCC. The second contribution is a formal semantics for those actions, which allows us to better understand the behavior of MCC systems and paves the way for the application of formal reasoning techniques. As an outcome, we also derive a more precise formalization of the core NAM features, which may contribute to further development of that framework and the related middleware.