Mobile Clouds as the Building Blocks of Shareconomy: Sharing Resources Locally and Widely

Mobile clouds embody a concept where mobile and wireless networks naturally embrace social networks in a practical and efficient fashion. In addition to enhancing communications performance and improving the efficiency in radio resource utilization, mobile clouds are a flexible platform for sharing distributed resources of mobile devices. We explore how physical and nonmaterial resources can be shared by social networks. Shareable resources residing in the mobile devices are considered primarily, but the resource sharing concept is extended to encompass universal resources. Finally, we shed some light on how the converged mobile, wireless, and social networks have the potential to become a key enabling technology of a novel resource trading paradigm called the shareconomy.