Mobile cloud messaging supported by XMPP primitives

Abstract

The increasing demand of the smartphones for processing power, storage space and energy saving is leading the rapid adaption of the mobile cloud computing (MCC) domain. Asynchronous mobile cloud communication is a two way process which in most cases is managed via REST (from mobile to cloud) and push technologies (from cloud to mobile). There are several push notification mechanisms provided by the cloud vendors and mobile operators for delivering messages to the mobile applications (e.g. GCM, APNS, MPNS, etc.). However, these mechanisms have certain constraints such as being platform specific, limited message payload and the number of the messages that can be sent to a single handset. This paper explored the possibility of implementing a messaging framework that can be used as open notification mechanism running at the cloud for handling asynchronous delegation of mobile tasks to cloud. The framework is developed by extending a XMPP-based IM infrastructure, which can be integrated with any application server and reconfigured on demand as the mobile workload grows or shrinks. The detailed analysis of the framework shows that it is possible to send messages to the smartphones with IM, at a quality of service similar to that of other push notification mechanisms.