Building a Platform to Bridge Low End Mobile Phones and Cloud Computing Services

Two waves of technology are dramatically changing daily life: cloud computing and mobile phones. New cloud computing services such as webmail and content rich data search have emerged. However, in order to use these services, a mobile phone must be able to run new applications and handle high network bandwidth. Worldwide, about 3.45 billion mobile phones are low end phones; they have low bandwidth and cannot run new applications. Because of this technology gap, most mobile users are unable to experience cloud computing services with their thumbs. In this paper, a novel platform, Thumb-in-Cloud, is proposed to bridge this gap. Thumb-in-Cloud consists of two subsystems: Thumb-Machine and Thumb-Gateways. Thumb-Machine is a virtual machine built into a low end phone to enable it to run new applications. Thumb-Gateways can tailor cloud computing services by reformatting and compressing the service to fit the phone’s profile.