Architecting Infrastructures for Cloud-Enabled Mobile Devices

The slow adoption of cloud computing by the industry has collapsed the initial expectations of everything shifting rapidly to the cloud. Big and complex services are either postponing their migration to the cloud, or have simply not considered it as an option. The real success is coming from small services which exploit the elasticity and availability of cloud resources to become available to hundreds and millions of users, many of which are using mobile devices. However, little or no progress has been made in developing new architectures that exploit the capabilities offered by cloud and mobile computing. In this paper, the cloud-enabled mobile devices concept is defined, making an overview of the related fields. People-as-a-Service is proposed as a new service model based on that concept, describing a high level architecture to support it, and presenting a business application based on this technology. As a result, cloud-enabled mobile devices promote the emergence of new scenarios and mobile applications based on new architectures where devices can act both as clients and servers.