Tech Lover 9

When it comes to mobile cloud computing there are several inherent obstacles that currently limits its growth and prevalence. Most of these have to do with restrictions related to mobile networks, namely variable data rates, intermittent connectivity and longer network latencies, compared to fixed broadband. These limitations are described in more details in an interesting article from Alcatel-Lucent called Mobile Cloud Computing Challenges. Although future 4G networks, like pure IP-based LTE (Long Term Evolution) will increase network bandwidth capacity greatly, with a potential downlink rate of 100Mbit/s and uplink of 50Mbit/s, mobile networks will always have their fundamental limitations  arising from radio spectrum limits.

Nevertheless, the analyst/research companies have been busy issuing new  studies that forecast a huge growth in mobile cloud services and applications. According to a study from Juniper Research from earlier this year, the market for mobile apps will grow 88% from 2009 to 2014 (to $9.5 billion). ABI Research forecasts that applications and services will migrate and be provisioned from the mobile cloud, instead of being downloaded and installed on mobile smartphones and tablets/netbooks.

Mobile cloud computing essentially means that the processing and data storage of applications is being performed by a cloud based IT infrastructure rather than on the native handset. Of course many service providers, such as Google and Facebook, provide mobile cloud services already. Normally, services are either fully accessed through a smartphone browser interface or through a hybrid approach by installing a light-client on the handset that performs some intermediate processing and lessens network burden, but otherwise connects and fetches services from the cloud.
While most apps are currently being downloaded and installed locally on the handsets, mobile cloud apps will enable users to run the directly from the cloud. This will bring several implications. For example, new type of mobile cloud phones, that are essentially less powerful smartphones, will start emerging. As discusses in one of my earlier posts, these handsets are specifically oriented toward running mobile cloud apps. Obviously, high-end smartphones will continue to be developed, particularly to manage processing intensive apps, such as games and graphic intensive apps.

However, due to the intrinsic limitations and latency concerns in the mobile network, new technologies and processes are needed to provide acceptable quality of service and user acceptance.
One of the technologies spurred to advance mobile cloud computing services is definitely HTML5, the latest version of the Web´s markup language. But what is it with HTML5 that’s important for mobile cloud computing? Well, there are several important elements:

• On-device caching – the possibility to store data off-line on the device for further processing, reducing the problem of interruptions in mobile connectivity and discontinuous user experience
• Canvas and video – making it possible to add graphics and video to a web page without having to install third-party plugins like Flash or Silverlight. When smartphones will generally support HTML5, they provide a powerful way to publish and process media on a page.
• Geo location – as an additional specification to HTML5, GeoLocation API will utilize smartphones location capabilities for integration with mobile cloud services and apps.
• Advanced form – mobile devices will benefit from more capable forms than in previous HTML versions, especially as they will reduce the need of downloading Javascript code and cause less round-trips between device and cloud server as the HTML5 browser becomes more capable.

These are some of the important mobile cloud enablers introduced by HMTL5 that should lead to a boost in new mobile cloud services and applications. However, not all smartphone platform and hardware developers have started to support HTML5. Both the Android and iPhone already do, so  it is only a matter of time when more mobile cloud apps start emerging.