The Swiss Army smartphone: cloud-based delivery of USB services

A smartphone can be configured to look like any Universal Serial Bus (USB) peripheral and can be managed remotely through its wireless data connection. By virtue of these features, smartphones are ideal vehicles for the delivery of a variety of brand-new, USB-powered services that support the management and troubleshooting of mobile laptops. We provide examples of such USB services and describe a general architecture for their implementation. The services are easy to deploy, because they can be extended to remote laptops without prior installation of new software, and well-suited for delivery through virtualization in a cloud infrastructure. While our examples target mostly the enterprise, USB services, especially virtualized ones, can easily be tailored to suit a broad set of consumer applications.