Markov chain based monitoring service for fault tolerance in mobile cloud computing

Mobile cloud computing is a combination of mobile computing and cloud computing, and provides cloud computing environment through various mobile devices. Recently, due to rapid expansion of smart phone market and wireless communication environment, mobile devices are considered as resource for large scale distributed processing. But mobile devices have several problems, such as unstable wireless connection, limitation of power capacity, low communication bandwidth and frequent location changes. As resource providers, mobile devices can join and leave the distributed computing environment unpredictably. This interrupts the undergoing operation, and the delay or failure of completing the operation may cause a system failure. Because of low reliability and no-guarantee of completing an operation, it is difficult to use a mobile device as a resource. That means that mobile devices are volatile. Therefore, we should consider volatility, one of dynamic characteristics of mobile devices, for stable resource provision. In this paper, we propose a monitoring technique based on the Markov Chain model, which analyzes and predicts resource states. With the proposed monitoring technique and state prediction, a cloud system will get more resistant to the fault problem caused by the volatility of mobile devices. The proposed technique diminishes the volatility of a mobile device through modeling the patterns of past states and making a prediction of future state of a mobile device.