Enabling Mobile Cloud Wide Spread Through an Evolutionary Market-Based Approach

Mobile clouds are an ongoing research topic that has yet to become ubiquitous as the now popular cloud paradigm. This is because of a number of issues with mobile clouds that still need to be addressed such as: incentives, security, privacy, context, data management, usability, and cost benefits. Out of these issues, the most important one that needs to be addressed is the issue of incentives, without which mobile clouds cannot gain enough users for the concept to be useful. Unlike public, company-owned cloud systems, in mobile clouds, the amount of resources or processing power is directly dependent on mobile cloud users that are in the proximity of the individual that requires extra resources. With an increase in the number of mobile cloud users willing to share resources or willing to use the service offered by others, comes an increase in the likeliness that enough mobile-cloud-enabled devices will be available. In this paper, we study incentives for mobile cloud systems and consider as a solution an evolutionary market-based approach to create these incentives. Creating a market for these systems is particularly difficult because of the large number of individuals that need to be involved and their high mobility.