Cloud Mobile Media: Opportunities, challenges, and directions

Three recent developments - increasing adoption of smart phones and tablets as desired platforms for infotainment, increased access to mobile broadband networks globally, and availability of public Clouds - are aligning to possibly enable a new generation of truly ubiquitous multimedia services on mobile devices: Cloud Mobile Media (CMM) services. Such services will be able to avail of the elasticity of cloud computing and ubiquity of cloud storage, and thereby not constrained either by mobile device capabilities, or availability of content. In this paper, we look at early trends in CMM services, and opportunities and benefits for new CMM services in the near future. We analyze the possible impact of such services, and issues that need to be addressed to make CMM services viable, including response time, user experience, energy, privacy, cost and scalability. We provide several directions for possible solutions, which include developing response time management techniques, scalable cloud media application, and cloud user experience measurement techniques. We also propose extending the Cloud beyond the traditional Internet to the edge of the wireless networks.