Vision

When we think of mobile cloud computing today, we typically refer to empowering mobile devices - in particular smartphones and tablets - with the capabilities of stationary resources residing in giant data centers. But what happens when these mobile devices become as powerful as our personal computers or more? This paper presents our vision of a future in which mobile devices become a core component of mobile cloud computing architectures. We envision a world where mobile devices will be capable of forming mobile clouds, or mClouds, to accomplish tasks locally without relying, when possible, on costly and, sometimes, inefficient backend communication. We discuss a possible mClouds architecture, its benefits and tradeoffs, and the user incentive scheme to support the mCloud design.