Dynamic group-based fault tolerance technique for reliable resource management in mobile cloud computing

Researches on utilizing mobile devices as resources in mobile cloud environments have gained attentions recently because of the enhanced computing power of mobile devices such as the advent of quad-core chips. However, mobile devices have several problems of the availability and the mobility. Especially, the availability and the mobility of mobile devices cause system faults more frequently due to dynamic changes, and system faults prevent applications using mobile devices from being processed reliably. Therefore, we classify mobile devices into groups according to the availability and the mobility in order to manage reliable mobile resource. Because information of mobile devices is constantly changing, grouping should consider the dynamic environment. We also provide dynamic group-based mobile cloud computing that applies fault tolerance techniques using checkpoints or replication in each group. The experimental result shows that our algorithm performs dynamic grouping, which is more suitable for the dynamic environment of mobile devices. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.