Managing mobile cloud computing considering objective and subjective perspectives

Mobile Cloud Computing enables mobile devices to augment constrained resources such as processing, storage, and battery autonomy by using the cloud infrastructure. As the network is a key element in integrating mobile devices to the cloud, a proper management of the mobile cloud computing environment is necessary. Such a management must take into account two main perspectives: administrator’s and end-user’s perspectives. The administrator is usually concerned with a more objective perspective based on Quality of Service parameters, such as throughput, delay, and jitter. On the other hand, the end-user has a more subjective perspective, observing his/her Quality of Experience when using a mobile cloud application or service. In this article, we introduce a management model and architecture for mobile cloud computing, exploiting both objective and subjective perspectives. As a proof of concept, we prototyped the architecture in a management system called CoLisEU, which allowed us to investigate this architecture and we discuss the benefits of the combined objective and subjective perspectives in our management architecture.