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Mobile cloud applications: opportunities, challenges and directions

The use of smartphones and tablets is set to surpass the use of PCs for Internet access, media experiences, and social networking. Recognizing the growing "bring your own device" trend, enterprises are increasingly embracing the use of multi-platform mobile devices. And for millions of users in many parts of the world, mobile devices are emerging as the primary means to participate in an increasingly online and digital world. The above trends have given rise to, and been facilitated by, the development and adoption of mobile applications, which leverage the unique capabilities of the mobile device including its location awareness and the numerous on-device sensors. However, mobile applications can also be limited by the processing and battery capabilities of mobile devices, which despite recent progress, shows a widening gap with the growing computing/power requirements of emerging Internet multimedia applications. The use of cloud computing can help bridge this gap, providing mobile applications the capabilities of cloud servers and storage together with the benefits of mobile devices and mobile connectivity, enabling a new class of media rich mobile cloud applications, with the additional benefit of true ubiquitous access from any device, anywhere.
 We discuss different types of consumer multimedia and enterprise mobile cloud applications that we see emerging. We describe their advantages, but also the various challenges that will need to be addressed to ensure their economic viability and mass adoption. In particular, we illustrate the challenges associated with ensuring high user experience including acceptable latency, low cloud and mobile network costs, and scalability to large number of users. We provide several directions for possible solutions, including developing cloud user experience measurement techniques, response time management techniques, and cloud media adaptation techniques. We also propose extending the Cloud beyond the traditional Internet to the edge of the wireless networks. We describe the advantages of the resulting Mobile Network Clouds, and discuss the problems that need to be addressed. Finally, to address scalability, we propose a novel Mobile Cloud Scheduling problem, that considers simultaneously mobile network and cloud resources to increase the number of concurrent mobile cloud application sessions that can be scheduled, while minimizing the cloud cost.