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Top1. Introduction
Storage is considered as one of biggest expenses of Information Technology. As the data growth in all enterprises is increasing almost 50% every year, so around 30% capital expenditure of each enterprise is used for storage. To overcome this, the concept of Cloud Storage came into existence and it ranges from an end user to an enterprise. Cloud Storage is provided by third party service providers known as Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) on a pay as per usage model. It means end user or enterprise have to pay money to the CSP as per the usage of their resources such as storage. The main advantage of this concept is that the initial cost of end user or enterprises is reduced means they don’t have to purchase the H/W, there is no maintenance cost as all of these resources will be provided by CSPs at very low cost. Cloud Storage main feature elasticity enables the user to use as much storage as he needs and release it after the use. The main idea behind low-cost cloud storage is that CSPs provide same storage to different organizations and end users when and where they will need it. As per NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology), Cloud Storage is “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”. Different service models of the cloud are Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service and Platform as a Service.
CSPs provide online storage where data is stored in different servers those are placed in different data centers located in different geographical locations. Users can access these services from any place, at any time and from any device as mobile, a tablet with an internet connection. It means there is no need that user has to keep with him storage devices all the time as pen drives, external HDD etc. Some commonly used clouds are Facebook, Instagram, Google Docs, One Drive etc. Well, one must be thinking how Facebook or Instagram can be included in cloud storage. Actually, the photos uploaded or the photo albums created by users are stored on their servers (Bocchi & Mellia, 2014).
As the latest trend regarding ubiquitous computing means computing everywhere, internet works as backbone by which each and everything is going to be connected. Now, it is important to integrate IoT (Internet of Things) with cloud computing because the data generated with IoT will be stored by virtualization on cloud. This concept of integration is called CoT (Cloud of Things).
In this paper, the authors reviewed three multi cloud storage systems for mobile devices Otixo, ES File Explorer and Mult Cloud and evaluate their performance on the basis of parameters as Data Usage, Battery Consumption and CPU Usage. In particular, authors proposed a novel approach that when used by mobile device users to access multi cloud storage systems, will consume very less resources of mobile devices. Nevertheless, authors restricted the scope of our study on multi cloud storage systems for mobile devices because several interesting challenges are raised when these multi cloud storage systems are accessed through mobile devices.
The remaining of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2, outlines the concept of mobile computing. Section 3 describes the concept of mobile cloud computing, Section 4 outlines the concept of mobile cloud storage and its architecture. Section 5 provides the concept of multi cloud storage and its architecture. In Section 6, the concept of IoT and cloud computing, their integration and applications are discussed, In Section 7, authors presented the related work, which describes the features and limitations of existing multi cloud storage systems. In Section 8, authors described the issues in existing multi cloud storage systems. Section 9, provides a novel approach for multi cloud storage for mobile devices. In section 10, authors presented implementation of proposed approach. Section11 describes results and discussions. Finally, in Section 12, authors concluded the paper and discussed on how this research can be further explored.