CoSMiC: A hierarchical cloudlet-based storage architecture for mobile clouds

Storage capacity is a constraint for current mobile devices. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is developed to augment device capabilities, facilitating to mobile users store/access of a large dataset on the cloud through wireless networks. However, given the limitations of network bandwidth, latencies, and devices battery life, new solutions are needed to extend the usage of mobile devices.This paper presents a novel design and implementation of a hierarchical cloud storage system for mobile devices based on multiple I/O caching layers. The solution relies on Memcached as a cache system, preserving its powerful capacities such as performance, scalability, and quick and portable deployment. The solution targets to reduce the I/O latency of current mobile cloud solutions. The proposed solution consists of a user-level library and extended Memcached back-ends. The solution aims to be hierarchical by deploying Memcached-based I/O cache servers across all the I/O infrastructure datapath.Our experimental results demonstrate that CoSMiC can significantly reduce the round-trip latency in presence of low cache hit ratios compared with a 3G connection even when using a multi-level cache hierarchy.