Multi-Tier, Secure, and Human Mobility Aware Cloud-Aided Mobile Systems

The recent popularity of cloud platforms gave birth to the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) paradigm, defined as “the availability of cloud computing services in a mobile ecosystem”. MCC aims at increasing, enhancing, and optimizing the computing capabilities of mobile devices by offloading mobile computation to the cloud. The idea behind MCC is simple: Delegate the execution of resource-hungry mobile applications' components to powerful clouds so to achieve faster execution and reduce the battery consumption on the real device. The results in literature are of static single users that offload data on the cloud in controlled laboratory experiments. In addition, efficient solutions that enable cloud-aided mobile execution ensuring the security and integrity of sensitive user data are lacking.
In this project we address two open challenges for the MCC research community. The first one is to include, the so far neglected, human mobility factor in the offloading process. Humans are dynamic, and their movement will favour one cloud with respect to the other based on the delay, energy gain, and so on. The second, but equally important, challenge concerns about security and privacy. Despite the many proposed frameworks for MCC, none of them integrates any measure for securing and protecting the code and user data sent to the cloud for offloading purposes. While the first challenge is important for offering a high Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of delay, efficiency, and resource allocation, the second one is crucial because users will avoid a system that is not secure and exposes their data.