Openness—Evolution of Mobile Communications: A Cloud View

Introduction

Technology enhancement continues to enable widespread connectivity. Mobility is an integral component of consuming and producing content, promoted through a wide array of connectivity choices. A choice of experiences enables proliferation, with a diversity of mobile devices and multimedia services. Service experience, in a connected world, is elemental, and one that has universal appeal. In this web of connectivity, both mobile devices - user facing - and machine type devices - non-user facing - are the two broad categories of information transactions.

Openness is an essential ingredient that fosters an unencumbered flow of information across entities: user-facing and non user-facing. Standardization is an integral component of openness. Indispensable – for the realization, preservation, and expansion of the Internet of Things – a paradigm, where the tethered and untethered entities interact and transact to provide an attractive service experience, in the ubiquitous Internet. Distribution – ubiquitous creation and consumption of information and intelligence.

Services of all sorts are rendered through the availability of resources of connectivity and the execution of applications of interest of a consumer or producer of information. Typically, the execution may either be localized to a device or separated through connectivity between a requesting device and a remote server. For allowing the execution and the experience of a service on a device, with limited resources – mobile device – independent of location, would be through connectivity to an operating system, in a network server. The relatively unconstrained resource availability and management capabilities, resident in a fixed network has the potential of rendering a consistent user-experience across disparate geo-locations of user connectivity. Experience consistency is likely to be more uniform across different devices since the execution environment for service rendering remains unchanged. Mobile cloud - an integral component - a part of the cloud paradigm (Hartig, 2009).

A consideration in the preservation of a consistent user-experience, in the cloud, is the notion of grid computing, where the performance of the network servers is sustained through the participation of additional servers on a resource demand driven basis. For example, if a popular service is launched by users, additional servers may be required to meet the computing demands for a sustained experience.

The compelling aspect of the cloud paradigm is the ability of any connectivity enabled device - mobile or fixed - to provide an attractive user experience, independent of location. Users are empowered to access their favorite services, independent of device type - mobile or fixed - enabling virtually unlimited usage scenarios. A few examples include homes, libraries, cafes, airports, trains, planes, automobiles, etc. Cloud mobility - remote processing and storage - paves the path towards widespread user-centric information accessibility.

This chapter reveals the role of openness, specifically standardization, in the mobile cloud – a cornerstone for an open, inter-operable realization.