1 9000

Response Time (milliseconds)

8000

7000

6000

Connectivity Status
5000

4000

3000

2000

1000

1
31
61
91
121
151
181
211
241
271
301
331
361
391
421
451
481
511
541
571
601
631
661
691
721
751
781
811
0
1
29
57
85
113
141
169
197
225
253
281
309
337
365
393
421
449
477
505
533
561
589
617
645
673
701
729
757
785
813
Time (Seconds)
Ping Sequence Number

(a) Intra-city Metro Transit Mobile Connectivity (b) Ping Response Time in Intra-city Metro Transit
Graph

Figure 3.2: Mobility Effect on 3G Network Connectivity and Application Response Time

into text files during execution of the application by the cloud server as well as the mo-

bile client. The text files were processed to generate the data that has been used for the

analysis in the following sections. We start by showing the impact of mobility on device

connectivity with the cloud while using a 3G cellular network.

3.1.2 Mobility Impact on Device Connectivity and Response Time in 3G Network

The graph in Figure 3.2 (a) shows the 3G device connectivity along the route where

colored (red) space shows the device is connected and white space shows the device is

disconnected. The study reveals that mobile device remains intermittently disconnected

for 33% of the total sample time. We have also considered the effect of user mobility on

response time of an application in 3G wireless network. Ping utility that is a basic tool

to measure the response time on the Internet was used to collect the response time data.

The graph in Figure 3.2 (b) shows the number of hikes in response time along the route.

These hikes in the response time are due to extra delay added by retransmissions on 3G

networks. More than 33% of the pings got either no response or their response time is

greater than 400 ms. The response time greater than 400 ms is unacceptable for delay

sensitive applications (Satyanarayanan et al., 2009).

These results suggest that there are significant disconnections and those disconnec-

tions can interrupt the cloud based mobile application execution. We now look into the

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