MCloudDB: A Mobile Cloud Database Service Framework

The recent advance in mobile network technologies (3G/4G) provides an efficient mobile network infrastructure supporting mobile users to access large volumes of mobile data. Now, many mobile applications are developed based on mobile databases on devices and conventional databases. Due to the limitations of mobile devices, using mobile databases on mobile devices encounters certain scalability issues in mobile data accesses and storage. One alternative approach is to use cloud-based databases to support mobile users and applications on mobile devices. This also runs into the several challenges, such as mobility support, localization, energy consumption, and performance concerns. This paper presents a mobile enabled cloud database solution, called MCloudDB, to address the related issues and needs. MCloudDB provides a mobile enabled cloud database infrastructure with a framework, which can be used as a bridge to connect and integrate mobile applications with back-end cloud databases to support mobile cloud data management and access services. The paper presents the design of this framework and the related key solutions for essential features in mobile cloud databases, such as multi-tenancy, elasticity, seamless connectivity and disaster recovery. A simple application example and related experiment results are reported.