VSP: A Virtual Smartphone Platform to Enhance the Capability of Physical Smartphone

Smart mobile devices have become ubiquitous, and people prefer to choose smartphone in daily life rather than use traditional personal computer. However, due to the hardware capability, performance of smartphones varies greatly and sometimes it cannot meet the demand of users. Furthermore, if smartphone is attacked by malicious application, the local private sensitive information will be leaked which in turn will cause huge losses. This paper proposes VSP, a Virtual Smartphone Platform. It offers a new way to enhance the capability of physical smartphone by providing virtual smartphone (VS) deployed in cloud. Users operate VS remotely through the thin-client of VSP on physical smartphones, and ignore the limits of physical mobile devices. The isolation of VS in cloud platform guarantees the security between VSes, and also prevents access to private sensitive information on physical devices. The evaluation indicates that average bandwidth cost with zlib is about 80 kBps and it is suitable for use in practice.