05-12-2012, 11:46 AM
Virtual Smartphone over IP
[attachment=42561]
Abstract
The number of smartphone users and mobile
application offerings are growing rapidly. A smartphone is often
expected to offer PC-like functionality. In this paper, we present
Virtual Smartphone over IP system that allows users to create
virtual smartphone images in the mobile cloud and to customize
each image to meet different needs. Users can easily and freely
tap into the power of the data center by installing the desired
mobile applications remotely in one of these images. Because the
mobile applications are controlled remotely, they are not
constrained by the limit of processing power, memory and
battery life of a physical smartphone.
INTRODUCTION
The number of smartphone users and mobile application
offerings are growing rapidly. Smartphones are often expected
to offer PC-like functionality, which requires powerful
processors, abundant memory and long-lasting battery life.
However, their hardware today is still very limited and
application developers are forced to take these limitations into
consideration.
A number of service providers such Dropbox [1] and
Zumodrive [2] provides online storage services to smartphone
users in attempt to alleviate the limitations of smartphone
storages. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is still
no service that offers full computation resources to smartphone
users. In this paper, we propose Virtual Smartphone over IP,
which provides cloud computing environment specifically
tailored for smartphone users. It allows users to create virtual
smartphone images in the cloud and to remotely run their
mobile applications in these images as they would locally. The
motivation is to allow smartphone users to more easily tap into
the power of the cloud and to free themselves from the limit of
processing power, memory and battery life of a physical
smartphone. Using our system, smartphone users can choose
to install their mobile applications either locally or in the cloud,
as illustrated in Figure 1.
BASIC DESIGN
Our Virtual Smartphone over IP system adopts an
architecture similar to ones commonly used by server hosting
providers. As illustrated in Figure 2, the system is composed
of a number of external smartphone clients, a front-end server,
a virtual smartphone farm, a management server and a network
file system (NFS).
Virtual smartphone farm is the most important
component of our system. It is a virtualization
environment that hosts a collection of virtual
smartphone images, each of which is dedicated to a
smartphone user. In Section III, we discuss in detail
about how we have implemented a virtual smartphone
farm.
The front-end server admits service requests from
smartphone users across the Internet and establishes
remote sessions to the appropriate virtual smartphone
images.
IMPLEMENTATION
We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype using
Android [3], an open-source mobile OS initiated by Google.
The main reason behind our choice is that Android OS is not
only designed for smartphone devices with an ARM processor,
but also is being ported to the x86 platform [4]. Although
Android-x86 is originally intended for netbooks, it gives us an
opportunity to create a virtual image of Android using a baremetal
hypervisor. This allows each virtual Android-x86 image
to tap into the power of server hardware in a data center. The
fact that we do not need a CPU emulator (i.e. x86-to-ARM) to
run the virtual image is very important since such emulator
always introduces enormous overhead and may neutralize any
performance advantage offered by a data center.
End-to-middle security
In [10], we proposed an end-to-middle security model to
defend against rogue wireless access point that appears to be
legitimate, but is set up for the purpose of intercepting traffic
between mobile users and the web. We pointed out that while
end-to-end security is the most effective countermeasure, in
practice it requires continuous diligence from users to ensure
that such security does take place as expected. It is even more
difficult for users to verify if a mobile application that interacts
with a web service does indeed encrypt its data traffic to
prevent man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, which is most
likely to happen at an untrusted wireless access point.
The basic idea of end-to-middle security is to have a trusted
middle point somewhere on the Internet. As soon as being
associated with an access point, a mobile user establishes a
secure channel with this middle point first, which then relay all
traffic from the user to the Internet. Although the traffic may
not be encrypted from the middle point outward, this approach
effectively prevents any MITM attack attempted by a rogue
access point.
RELATED WORK
Satyanarayanan et al. [12] outlined their vision of letting
mobile users seamlessly utilize nearby computers to obtain the
resources of cloud computing by instantiates a "cloudlet" that
rapidly synthesizes virtual machines on nearby infrastructure
that can be access through WLAN. Baratto et al presented
MobiDesk [13], a virtual desktop computing hosting
infrastructure that provides full featured PC desktop
environment to mobile users. Potter et al presented an
extension of this infrastructure they call DeskPod [14], which
focuses on reliability issues. Although these literatures related
to our work in terms of allowing mobile users to remotely
access virtual machine images, our objective of leveraging the
performance of mobile applications is different from theirs
since they focus on delivering PC applications to mobile users.
Our work is most closely related to Chun et al. [15] as we
share similar objective and focus on mobile applications. Chun
recognized five categories of augmented execution to speed up
mobile applications, namely Primary, Background, Mainline,
Hardware and Multiplicity and presented a research agenda to
bring the vision into reality. At the time of this writing, it is
not clear whether they have progressed and implemented any
prototype. Their project homepage can be found in [16]. Our
Virtual Smartphone over IP system can be seen as a specific
implementation of the Hardware augmentation.
CONLUSION
In this paper, we presented Virtual Smartphone over IP
system that allows smartphone users to create virtual images of
smartphones in the cloud and access these images remotely
from their physical smartphone. The prototype we
implemented integrates the remote environment with the local
environment and allows users to run remote applications as
they would locally. Through our prototype, mobile
applications installed in the cloud can access sensor readings
on the physical smartphone. Our prototype also boosts the
performance of mobile applications by providing virtually
unlimited computing resources at user’s fingertips, without
draining the device battery.
[attachment=42561]
Abstract
The number of smartphone users and mobile
application offerings are growing rapidly. A smartphone is often
expected to offer PC-like functionality. In this paper, we present
Virtual Smartphone over IP system that allows users to create
virtual smartphone images in the mobile cloud and to customize
each image to meet different needs. Users can easily and freely
tap into the power of the data center by installing the desired
mobile applications remotely in one of these images. Because the
mobile applications are controlled remotely, they are not
constrained by the limit of processing power, memory and
battery life of a physical smartphone.
INTRODUCTION
The number of smartphone users and mobile application
offerings are growing rapidly. Smartphones are often expected
to offer PC-like functionality, which requires powerful
processors, abundant memory and long-lasting battery life.
However, their hardware today is still very limited and
application developers are forced to take these limitations into
consideration.
A number of service providers such Dropbox [1] and
Zumodrive [2] provides online storage services to smartphone
users in attempt to alleviate the limitations of smartphone
storages. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is still
no service that offers full computation resources to smartphone
users. In this paper, we propose Virtual Smartphone over IP,
which provides cloud computing environment specifically
tailored for smartphone users. It allows users to create virtual
smartphone images in the cloud and to remotely run their
mobile applications in these images as they would locally. The
motivation is to allow smartphone users to more easily tap into
the power of the cloud and to free themselves from the limit of
processing power, memory and battery life of a physical
smartphone. Using our system, smartphone users can choose
to install their mobile applications either locally or in the cloud,
as illustrated in Figure 1.
BASIC DESIGN
Our Virtual Smartphone over IP system adopts an
architecture similar to ones commonly used by server hosting
providers. As illustrated in Figure 2, the system is composed
of a number of external smartphone clients, a front-end server,
a virtual smartphone farm, a management server and a network
file system (NFS).
Virtual smartphone farm is the most important
component of our system. It is a virtualization
environment that hosts a collection of virtual
smartphone images, each of which is dedicated to a
smartphone user. In Section III, we discuss in detail
about how we have implemented a virtual smartphone
farm.
The front-end server admits service requests from
smartphone users across the Internet and establishes
remote sessions to the appropriate virtual smartphone
images.
IMPLEMENTATION
We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype using
Android [3], an open-source mobile OS initiated by Google.
The main reason behind our choice is that Android OS is not
only designed for smartphone devices with an ARM processor,
but also is being ported to the x86 platform [4]. Although
Android-x86 is originally intended for netbooks, it gives us an
opportunity to create a virtual image of Android using a baremetal
hypervisor. This allows each virtual Android-x86 image
to tap into the power of server hardware in a data center. The
fact that we do not need a CPU emulator (i.e. x86-to-ARM) to
run the virtual image is very important since such emulator
always introduces enormous overhead and may neutralize any
performance advantage offered by a data center.
End-to-middle security
In [10], we proposed an end-to-middle security model to
defend against rogue wireless access point that appears to be
legitimate, but is set up for the purpose of intercepting traffic
between mobile users and the web. We pointed out that while
end-to-end security is the most effective countermeasure, in
practice it requires continuous diligence from users to ensure
that such security does take place as expected. It is even more
difficult for users to verify if a mobile application that interacts
with a web service does indeed encrypt its data traffic to
prevent man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, which is most
likely to happen at an untrusted wireless access point.
The basic idea of end-to-middle security is to have a trusted
middle point somewhere on the Internet. As soon as being
associated with an access point, a mobile user establishes a
secure channel with this middle point first, which then relay all
traffic from the user to the Internet. Although the traffic may
not be encrypted from the middle point outward, this approach
effectively prevents any MITM attack attempted by a rogue
access point.
RELATED WORK
Satyanarayanan et al. [12] outlined their vision of letting
mobile users seamlessly utilize nearby computers to obtain the
resources of cloud computing by instantiates a "cloudlet" that
rapidly synthesizes virtual machines on nearby infrastructure
that can be access through WLAN. Baratto et al presented
MobiDesk [13], a virtual desktop computing hosting
infrastructure that provides full featured PC desktop
environment to mobile users. Potter et al presented an
extension of this infrastructure they call DeskPod [14], which
focuses on reliability issues. Although these literatures related
to our work in terms of allowing mobile users to remotely
access virtual machine images, our objective of leveraging the
performance of mobile applications is different from theirs
since they focus on delivering PC applications to mobile users.
Our work is most closely related to Chun et al. [15] as we
share similar objective and focus on mobile applications. Chun
recognized five categories of augmented execution to speed up
mobile applications, namely Primary, Background, Mainline,
Hardware and Multiplicity and presented a research agenda to
bring the vision into reality. At the time of this writing, it is
not clear whether they have progressed and implemented any
prototype. Their project homepage can be found in [16]. Our
Virtual Smartphone over IP system can be seen as a specific
implementation of the Hardware augmentation.
CONLUSION
In this paper, we presented Virtual Smartphone over IP
system that allows smartphone users to create virtual images of
smartphones in the cloud and access these images remotely
from their physical smartphone. The prototype we
implemented integrates the remote environment with the local
environment and allows users to run remote applications as
they would locally. Through our prototype, mobile
applications installed in the cloud can access sensor readings
on the physical smartphone. Our prototype also boosts the
performance of mobile applications by providing virtually
unlimited computing resources at user’s fingertips, without
draining the device battery.