Towards Mobile Cloud Applications: offloading Resource-Intensive Tasks to Hybrid Clouds

Purpose – Cloud computing becomes mobile when a mobile device tries to access the shared pool of computing resources provided by the cloud, on demand. Mobile applications may enrich their functionality by delegating heavy tasks to the clouds as the remote processing and storage have become possible by adding asynchronous behavior in the communication. However, developing mobile cloud applications involves working with services and APIs from different cloud vendors, which mostly are not interoperable across clouds. Moreover, by adding asynchronicity, mobile applications must rely on push mechanisms which are considered to be moderately reliable, and thus not recommended in scenarios that require high scalability and quality of service (QoS). To counter these problems, and the purpose of this paper, is to design a middleware framework, Mobile Cloud Middleware (MCM), which handles the interoperability issues and eases the use of process‐intensive services from smartphones by extending the concept of mobile h...