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Recent years have seen considerable interest in mobile cloud computing and edge cloud computing. This paper presents a mobile Intercloud system for supporting mobile cloud computing in general and edge cloud computing in particular. In essence, a mobile user with a mobile terminal can set up a virtual mobile terminal with applications and data in a central/home cloud. The virtual mobile terminal can facilitate task and computation offloading and other functions. Moreover, when a mobile terminal joins an edge cloud, the virtual mobile terminal (including required applications and data) can be migrated to enhance system efficiency and the user experience (e.g., shorter access delays). An experimental prototype has been developed for evaluating certain basic object transfer functions. To support the application transfer function, we formulate both finite- and infinite-horizon Markov decision models to determine decision policies (i.e., should an application be transferred to an edge cloud). The transfer decision depends on various factors, including transfer cost, duration associated with the edge cloud, usage probability, and usage cost in the central cloud and edge cloud. Based on the models, we obtain closed-form solutions for the decision policies, which can be expressed in meaningful formulas to provide useful insights for edge cloud computing in general. To evaluate the mobile Intercloud system for edge cloud computing, we conducted extensive evaluations, including experimental evaluation for testing the basic functions and protocols, analytical evaluation for studying the analytical models, and simulation evaluation for analyzing performance in a multiuser and multicloud environment in particular. The experimental, simulation, and analytical results provide useful insights into the design and development of the mobile Intercloud system for edge cloud computing as well as decision policies for application transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intercloud seeks to facilitate resource sharing among clouds. To support Intercloud, a trust evaluation framework among clouds and users is required. For trust evaluation, conventional protocols are typically based on a centralized architecture focusing on a one-way relationship. For Intercloud, the environment is highly dynamic and distributed, and relationships can be one-way or two-way (i.e., clouds provide services to each other). This paper presents a distributed trust evaluation protocol with privacy protection for Intercloud. The new contributions and innovative features are summarized below. First, feedback is protected by homomorphic encryption with verifiable secret sharing. Second, to cater to the dynamic nature of Intercloud, trust evaluation can be conducted in a distributed manner and is functional even when some of the parties are offline. Third, to facilitate customized trust evaluation, an innovative mechanism is used to store feedback, such that it can be processed flexibly while protecting feedback privacy. The protocol has been proved based on a formal security model. Simulations have been performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the protocol. The results show that even when half of the clouds are malicious or offline, by choosing suitable operational parameters the protocol can still support effective trust evaluation with privacy protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to conventional gaming-on-demand services that stream gaming video from cloud to players’ terminals, a decomposed cloud gaming platform supports flexible migrations of gaming components between the cloud server and the players’ terminals. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the proposed decomposed gaming system. The cognitive resource optimization of the system under distinct targets, including the minimization of cloud, network, and terminal resources and response delay, subject to quality of service (QoS) assurance, is formulated as a graph partitioning problem that is solved by exhaustive searches. Simulations and experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of cognitive resource management in a cloud gaming system to efficiently adapt to variations in the service environments, such as increasing the number of supported devices and reducing the network bandwidth consumption of user terminals, while satisfying different QoS requirements for gaming sessions. We also suggest two heuristic algorithms based on local greedy and genetic algorithm approaches, which can potentially provide scalable but suboptimal solutions in large-scale implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud gaming systems host the game in the cloud, while Gameplays and views are streamed to the players’ terminals in the form of encoded video frames. To address the high-bandwidth issue of real-time gaming video transmission, we have proposed a cloudlet-assisted multiplayer cloud gaming system to encourage cooperative video sharing, which exploits the similarities of video frames among multiple players in the same crowd playing the same game via a secondary ad hoc network. In this paper, we provide a detailed modeling of the proposed system, including the correlation between video frames, mobility of terminal devices, and diversity of network quality of service for distinct players. With necessary mathematical formulations, we study the players’ behaviors regarding the cooperative sharing patterns to optimize the system performance in terms of the quality of users’ experience. Also, heuristic algorithms are proposed to reduce the computational complexity. Empirical study and trace-driven simulation results illustrate the impact of mobility on the system performance and show that the proposed solution is able to provide better quality of experience compared with the existing platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]