We are in the midst of the emergence of two revolutionary technologies; cloud computing and smart mobile devices. As these two technologies co-evolve they are driving the development of a new computing paradigm. Cloud computing centres, accessible through the Internet, produce shared pools of resources (e.g., software, storage, virtual machines) that can be run with much lower capital and management costs than traditional computing servers. Smart mobile devices have become ubiquitous tools for both content consumption and content creation. These two new technologies perfectly complement each other, with cloud servers providing the engine for computing and smart mobile devices naturally serving as a human interface and untethered sensory inputs. Together, they are poised to transform the landscape of a wide array of important applications, such as mobile e-commerce, social networking, mobile healthcare, and augmented reality.
Professor Vincent Wong will soon be visiting the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg to continue his research into architectures that integrate these two technologies. UBC awarded Prof. Wong the Faculty Killam Fellowship to support this work.
Prof. Wong will focus on an emerging architecture of the mobile-cloud paradigm that offloads heavy computational tasks from smart mobile devices to large pools of computing servers residing deep within the Internet. In this way mobile devices only need to run applications and store ephemeral data. In the future, mobile cloud computing may utilize micro cloud centres as well. In this architecture smart mobile devices in a limited region would form a shared pool of computing resources to serve the computational demands of peer nodes in a local area.
Prof. Wong’s is developing an architecture that would allow each user to have the option to download the content from the cloud or as a peer download. The objective is to jointly minimize the cost of data dissemination and minimize the delay in spreading the content. The cellular users should decide whether to download the content from the cellular network or wait for a chance of peer download. The new architecture will incorporate social networking and the wireless capacity of smart phones for data dissemination and cloud access. Prof. Wong’s analysis will need to consider not only the technical capacity of the network and power consumption but also users social ties and costs, and the capacity of peer links.
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Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty recognized by peers with UBC Killam Research Fellowships