Volare

With the recent widespread use of smart mobile devices, as well as the increasing availability of fast and reliable wireless Internet connections for mobile devices, there is increased interest in mobile applications where the majority of the processing occurs on the server side. The flexibility, stability and scalability offered by cloud services make them an ideal architecture to use in client applications in a resource limited mobile environment. This is because mobile application usage patterns tend to be uneven, with various usage spikes according to time and location. However, the mobile setting presents a set of new challenges that cloud service discovery methods developed for non-mobile environments cannot address. The requirements a mobile client device will have from a cloud service may change due to changes in the context of the device, which may include hardware resources, environmental variables or user preferences. Binding to a service offering different quality of service levels from the ones required may lead to excess consumption of mobile resources such as battery life, as well as unnecessarily high provision costs. This paper introduces VOLARE, a middleware-based solution that monitors the resources and context of the device, and dynamically adapts cloud service requests accordingly, at discovery time or at runtime. This approach will allow for more resource-efficient and reliable cloud service discovery, as well as significant cost savings at runtime.