Deploying cloud services in mobile networks

Mobile networks have gone through various stages of evolution with each stage aimed at addressing a wide range of challenges and limitations. During the early evolutions of mobile networks - 2G, 2.5G, 3G -, the key challenge was to investigate efficient and cost effective ways of delivering higher data speeds. This led to the proposals and development of 4G LTE networks based on a flat all-IP architecture with Internet based protocols. However, recent trends indicates that the Internet-like architecture in mobile networks has further enabled Internet based cloud service providers to provide Over-The-Top (OTT) applications to mobile devices bypassing and competing with the mobile operator on services such as voice, video, messaging and gaming. This is a key motivation for cloud service providers and mobile operators to explore various opportunities in which they can both leverage on their existing infrastructures in order to efficiently deploy cloud services in mobile environments. In this paper we study the challenges and limitations that constrains the efficient deployment of cloud services in mobile environments. We then propose a collaborative approach in which the cloud service provider and mobile operator can dynamically manage the underlying mobile network infrastructure resources in order to optimise the delivery of cloud services in mobile environments. This is achieved by using cloud management approaches with the ability to factor in mobile resources such as mobility and frequency spectrums while also integrating the cloud service provider and mobile operator cloud infrastructures.