ZTE

ZTE Communications ›› 2011, Vol. 9 ›› Issue (1): 22-26.

• Special Topic • Previous Articles     Next Articles

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

Fung Po Tso, Lin Cui, Lizhuo Zhang, and Weijia Jia   

  1. City University of Hong Kong
  • Online:2011-03-25 Published:2011-03-25
  • About author:Fung Po Tso (posco.cs@cityu.edu.hk) received B.Eng. and M.Phil. degrees from City University of Hong Kong. He is currently working towards a Ph.D. degree. His research interests include the design and applications of mobile communication systems, and system performance measurement and optimization.

    Lin Cui (lincui2@student.cityu.edu.hk) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong. He received his bachelor’s degree from Shandong University in 2007, and a master’s degree from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2009. His research interests include mobile computing systems and wireless ad hoc/sensor networks.

    Lizhuo Zhang (lizhuocs@cityu.edu.hk) received his Ph.D. degree from the Central South University, China. He is currently a senior research associate in City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include multimedia communication, wireless networks, and mobile systems.

    Weijia Jia (wei.jia@cityu.edu.hk) is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, and director of Future Networking Center, Shenzhen Research Institute of City University of Hong Kong. He received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Center South University, China, and a Master of Applied Science and Ph.D. from Polytechnic Faculty of Mons, Belgium. He was a research fellow at the German National Research Center for Information Science (GMD) in Bonn (St. Augustine) from 1993 to 1995. His research interests include next generation wireless communication, protocols and heterogeneous networks, distributed systems, and multicast and anycast QoS routing protocols. He has published in various IEEE journals, has contributed chapters to books, and has refereed international conference proceedings.
  • Supported by:
    The paper is partially supported by CityU Applied Research Grant (ARG) under Grant No. 9667033, Shenzhen Basic Research Grant under No. JC200903170456A, Shenzhen-HK Innovation Cycle Grant under No. ZYB200907080078A, RGC General Research Fund (GRF), HK SAR under Grant No. CityU 114609, CityU Applied R & D Centre (ARD (Ctr)) under Grant No. 9681001, and China NSF under Grant No. 61070222/F020802.

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Abstract: 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.

Key words: mobile cloud computing, low end mobile phone, mobile OS, middleware