An Overlay File System for cloud-assisted mobile applications

With cloud assistance, a mobile application can offload its resource-demanding computation tasks to the cloud (public cloud, cloudlet, or personal cloud, etc). This leads to a scenario where computation tasks in the same application run concurrently on both the mobile device and the cloud. These tasks need to save, read, and write files on both the mobile device and the cloud. An important challenge is to ensure that the tasks are able to access and share the files in a manner that is efficient, consistent, and transparent to locations. The paper addresses this issue by designing an application-level file system called Overlay File System (OFS). To improve efficiency, OFS maintains and buffers local copies of data sets on both the cloud and the mobile device. OFS ensures consistency and guarantees that all the reads get the latest data. It combines write-invalidate and write-update policies to effectively reduce the network traffic incurred by invalidating/updating stale data copies and to reduce the application delay when the latest data cannot be accessed locally. To guarantee location transparency, OFS creates an unified view of the data that is location independent and is accessible as local storage. Our experiments show that OFS can effectively support task offloading and efficient execution of offloaded tasks by significantly decreasing both file access latency and network traffic incurred by file accesses.