GIT-CERCS-13-06
Minsung Jang, Karsten Schwan, Ketan Bhardwaj, Ada Gavrilovska, Adhyas Avasthi,
Personal Clouds: Sharing and Integrating Networked Resources to Enhance End User Experiences
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 Œscope‚ 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 hypervisorlevel,
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.