A framework for partitioning and execution of data stream applications in mobile cloud computing

The advances in technologies of cloud computing and mobile computing enable the newly emerging mobile cloud computing paradigm. Three approaches have been proposed for mobile cloud applications: 1) extending the access to cloud services to mobile devices; 2) enabling mobile devices to work collaboratively as cloud resource providers; 3) augmenting the execution of mobile applications on portable devices using cloud resources. In this paper, we focus on the third approach in supporting mobile data stream applications. More specifically, we study the computation partitioning, which aims at optimizing the partition of a data stream application between mobile and cloud such that the application has maximum speed/throughput in processing the streaming data. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work to study the partitioning problem for mobile data stream applications, where the optimization is placed on achieving high throughput of processing the streaming data rather than minimizing the make span of executions in other applications. We first propose a framework to provide runtime support for the dynamic partitioning and execution of the application. Different from existing works, the framework not only allows the dynamic partitioning for a single user but also supports the sharing of computation instances among multiple users in the cloud to achieve efficient utilization of the underlying cloud resources. Meanwhile, the framework has better scalability because it is designed on the elastic cloud fabrics. Based on the framework, we design a genetic algorithm to perform the optimal partition. We have conducted extensive simulations. The results show that our method can achieve more than 2X better performance over the execution without partitioning.