Personal clouds: Sharing and integrating networked resources to enhance end user experiences
Minsung Jang, Karsten Schwan, Ketan Bhardwaj, Ada Gavrilovska, Adhyas Avasthi · 2014
End user experiences on mobile devices with their rich sets of sensors are constrained by limited device battery lives and restricted form factors, as well as by the `scope' of the data available locally. The `Personal Cloud' distributed software abstractions address these issues by enhancing the capabilities of a mobile device via seamless use of both nearby and remote cloud resources. In contrast to vendor-specific, middleware-based cloud solutions, Personal Cloud instances are created at hypervisor-level, to create for each end user the federation of networked resources best suited for the current environment and use. Specifically, the Cirrostratus extensions of the Xen hypervisor can federate a user's networked resources to establish a personal execution environment, governed by policies that go beyond evaluating network connectivity to also consider device ownership and access rights, the latter managed in a secure fashion via standard Social Network Services. Experimental evaluations with both Linux- and Android-based devices, and using Facebook as the SNS, show the approach capable of substantially augmenting a device's innate capabilities, improving application performance and the effective functionality seen by end users.