Efficient Mobile Clouds: Forecasting the Future Connectivity of Mobile and IoT Devices to Save Energy and Bandwidth

Use cases in the Internet of Things (IoT) and in mobile clouds often require the interaction of one or more mobile devices with their infrastructure to provide users with services. Ideally, this interaction is based on a reliable connection between the communicating devices, which is often not the case. Since most use cases do not adequately address this issue, service quality is often compromised. Aimed to address this issue, this paper proposes a novel approach to forecast the connectivity and bandwidth of mobile devices by applying machine learning to the context data recorded by the various sensors of the mobile device. This concept, designed as a microservice, has been implemented in the mobile middleware CloudAware, a system software infrastructure for mobile cloud computing that integrates easily with mobile operating systems, such as Android. We evaluate our approach with real sensor data and show how to enable mobile devices in the IoT to make assumptions about their future connectivity, allowing for intelligent and distributed decision making on the mobile edge of the network. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.