Leveraging client-side storage techniques for enhanced use of multiple consumer cloud storage services on resource-constrained mobile devices

Despite high adoption rate among consumers, cloud storage services still suffer from many functional limitations and security issues. Recent studies propose utilization of RAID-like techniques in addition to multiple cloud storage services as an effective solution, but to the best of our knowledge, there is no research work done on applying this approach to resource-constrained mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a solution for mobile devices that unifies storage from multiple cloud providers into a centralized storage pool that is better in terms of availability, capacity, performance, reliability and security. First, we explore the feasibility of applying various storage technologies to address the aforementioned issues. Then, we validate our solution in comparisons with single cloud storage by implementation of a working prototype on mobile device. Our results show that it can improve the usage of consumer cloud storage at zero monetary cost, while the minimal overheads incurred are actually compensated by the performance gained. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.