Context-Awareness in Opportunistic Mobile Cloud Computing

Introduction

Nowadays, the ubiquity of mobile devices is no longer a futuristic figment, but has actually become a present day reality. Spanning from wireless sensors to intelligent handhelds, mobile devices are gradually interweaving themselves into the surrounding environment, thus starting to resemble what Mark Weiser called “technologies that disappear” (Weiser, 1991). The advent of smartphones has brought forth cutting edge technologies in mobile computing that are rivaling those normally found in traditional desktop systems - dual-core or even quad-core platforms with extensive memory and storage capacities. These impressive features are augmented by high-end sensors, such as accelerometers, digital magnetometers and many more. But probably the most attractive feature of all is given by the high speed and large bandwidth wireless radios embedded in said devices, such as WiFi, 3G, and, as of currently, 4G networks. Furthermore, mobile software has also seen a shift in perspective as the need for rich applications to be deployed on a plethora of device platforms is growing in urgency.

The continuous development and improvement of smartphone platforms have yielded a most important issue which seems to have eluded mobile Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and software engineers alike, namely extreme energy consumption. Such a concern could have been ignored or even gone unnoticed if it hadn't overlapped with another pressing matter: battery manufacturers are struggling with the physical limit of current technologies (Schlachter, 2012). These two concurrent factors are endangering the reputation of both mobile hardware and software providers, as customer dissatisfaction is increasing with each passing day. It seems that the excelling computing power and the myriad feature sets of smartphones are being dragged down by low battery life (which eventually leads to the low availability of the mobile device).