Mobile Clouds: Exploiting Distributed Resources in Wireless, Mobile and Social Networks

10

Mobile Clouds Applications

   

We are all agreed that our theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

Niels Bohr

In this chapter we discuss several applications that exploit or support the mobile cloud concept. Some applications are already commercially available, while other applications described in this chapter are still in the lab phase. The applications are grouped by their architecture type and the cooperation form explained in previous chapters.

10.1 Introduction

The cloud concept is very popular these days and even mobile clouds are getting more attention lately. Mobile clouds are entering the market place of mobile apps. Some readers might even have used one or more commercial realization forms of the mobile cloud, maybe under a different name such as mashup or swarm intelligence. Nearly all of these realizations come in the form of a mobile app that needs to be installed by the user, and less frequent are the realizations done as web services. For the user it does not make a big difference whether to use a native app or a web service. Without going into detail, the web services are easier to deploy as they are less platform dependent, but native apps offer more flexibility in programming as well as additional access to programming interfaces referred to as application programming interfaces (APIs). The latter are needed to get access to hardware sensors ...