Clone2Clone (C2C): Peer-to-Peer Networking of Smartphones on the Cloud

In this work we introduce Clone2Clone (C2C), a distributed peer-to-peer platform for cloud clones of smartphones. C2C shows dramatic performance improvement that is made possible by offloading communication between smartphones on the cloud. Along the way toward C2C, we study the performance of device-clones hosted in various virtualization environments in both private (local servers) and public (Amazon EC2) clouds. We build the first Amazon Customized Image (AMI) for Android-OS—a key tool to get reliable performance measures of mobile cloud systems—and show how it boosts up performance of Android images on the Amazon cloud service. We then design, build, and implement C2C. Upon it we build CloneDoc, a secure real-time collaboration system for smartphone users. We measure the performance of CloneDoc by means of experiments on a testbed of 16 Android smartphones and clones hosted on both private and public cloud services. We show that C2C makes it possible to implement distributed execution of advanced peer-to-peer services in a network of mobile smartphones reducing 3 times the cellular data traffic and saving 99%, 80%, and 30% of the battery for respectively security checks, user status update and document editing.