Coordinating Proactive Social Devices in a Mobile Cloud: Lessons Learned and a Way Forward

Recent device shipment trends strongly indicate that the number of Web-enabled devices other than PCs and smart phones are growing rapidly. Marking the end of the dominant era of these two traditional device categories, people will soon commonly use various types of Internet-connected devices in their daily lives, where no single device will dominate. Since today's devices are mostly standalone and only stay in sync in limited ways, new approaches are needed for mastering the complexity arising from the world of many types of devices, created by different manufacturers and implementing competing standards. Today, the most common denominator for dealing with the differences is using clouds. Unfortunately, however, while the cloud is well suited for numerous activities, there are also serious limitations, especially when considering systems that consist of numerous, battery-powered computing devices that have limited connectivity. In this paper, we provide an insight to our research where totally cloud-based orchestration of cooperating devices is partitioned into more local actions, where constant communication with the cloud backend can be at least partially omitted.