Walking in the Clouds: Deployment and Performance Trade-Offs of Smart Mobile Applications for Intelligent Environments

Cloud computing is still surfing the hype wave of emerging technologies. Delivering hardware, software and resources as a service over the network, the paradigm is also attracting a good deal of excitement in the mobile computing space. In this work, we challenge the proclaimed benefits of mobile cloud computing using smartphones as thin clients to access remote running applications, especially for applications that require contextual intelligence. Our experiments using mobile healthcare applications show that many resource and performance trade-offs exist and that current deployment schemes for these kind of applications are rough around the edges. We show how a modular design philosophy for mobile applications enables more optimal deployment and performance when leveraging cloud technology.