Efficient Ubiquitous Big Data Storage Strategy for Mobile Cloud Computing over HetNet

With the ever increasing data and computational demands from mobile users, heterogenous wireless networks (HetNets) and mobile cloud computing (MCC) have been advocated as a promising solution to meet these demands. Insufficient bandwidth is one of the most important challenges being faced by a successful implementation of the MCC technology due to heavy data traffic. The MCC implementation on HetNet increases the bandwidth available to each base station (BS) by frequency reuse. In this paper, a novel data storage method for big data files is proposed, along with a data correction technique to deal with the issue of failure of a data chunk retrieval. The proposed algorithm exploits the multiple paths that are available between a user and the cloud storage system in a MCC-HetNet environment. Since the bottleneck in the MCC is the wireless link between the user equipment (UE) and the BS, we have implemented the algorithm on the wireless links between the UE and the BS. The simulated results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional data storage method between the mobile device and the cloud system.

I. Introduction

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs are becoming a vital part of the human life as a communication tool and real time information source. Mobile users accumulate the experience of various services from mobile applications, which run on the devices and/or on remote servers via wireless networks. However, one of the most important challenges faced by mobile devices is the limited resource in terms of device battery life, storage, bandwidth, to name a few [1]. These limited resources can significantly deteriorate the mobile users' performance in terms of quality of service (QoS). To actualize the ever-increasing demand for these resources, mobile network operators (MNOs) and researchers are considering two distinct, but complementary solution technologies, namely HetNets and MCC. A HetNet, which is composed of a conventional macro-cellular network and small cell networks, has been recognized as an infrastructure enhancement to increase the overall network coverage while enabling the mobile users to achieve high data rates through frequency reuse. On the other hand, MCC is a technology designed to enhance the user equipmentś resources such as computational resources, storage space, battery life, to name a few. MCC can be considered as a paradigm whereby mobile applications offload the data processing and storage from the user equipment to a powerful and resource-rich cloud computing system. As such, MCC integrates cloud computing into a wireless network. Cloudlet is another technology enhancement which has been proposed in [2] to further amplify the performance of MCC. It is a self-managed small-scale cloud data center located at the edge of the Internet just one wireless link away from the UE, whose purpose is to provide a powerful computing and storage resources to the mobile devices with low latency.