Cloud computing: Methods and practical approaches edition:1st pages:155-175
Mobile devices and their applications take advantage of cloud computing not only to overcome their limitations in computing, memory, and storage resources, but also to easily scale up to a large number of users. Many common mobile applications we use every day, such as e-mail, new, social networking, games, already rely on the cloud paradigm due to these reasons. Another trend of the last decade is the evolution towards smart applications that take into account the user’s context, such as his whereabouts and ongoing activities, to adapt the behaviour of the application according to the current situation. With context management and inference becoming fairly complex processes, cloud services can offer an edge by taking over the most computationally intensive context management tasks, and have these tasks carried out only once for multiple users. However, as a lot of this contextual information is being sensed and captured by the mobile device itself, it is not always clear whether it makes sense to upload all the raw sensed data to the cloud and have it completely processed there. These trade-offs depend on the amount of data being communicated and the kind of processing that is required. In this chapter, we analyze the challenges to develop context-aware cloud services for mobile applications, and present a conceptual architecture for context processing and service provisioning in the Platform-as-a-Service layer. We highlight various architectural viewpoints of the presented federated context-processing middleware and round up this chapter with a research roadmap for the future.