μCloud: Towards a New Paradigm of Rich Mobile Applications

Rich mobile applications are characterized by rich functionality, offline usability and portability. However, it isnot trivial to simultaneously satisfy all the three criteria. Existing approaches such stand-alone applications and the thin-client architecture satisfy only a subset of these criteria. In this paper, we show that rich mobile applications can be achieved through the convergence of mobile and cloud computing. We address two main issues in cloud-enabled mobile applications, namely complexity of application development and offline usability. We then propose μCloud framework which models a rich mobile application as a graph of components distributed onto mobile devices and the cloud. Lastly, we discuss μCloud's major research issues, i.e., workflow language for interactive applications, offline usability, secure and scalable multi-tenancy, portability and energy optimization.