A study of the advantages & disadvantages of mobile cloud computing versus native environment

Abstract: The advent of cloud computing has enabled the possibility of moving complex calculations and device operations to the “cloud” in an effective way. With cloud computing being applied to mobile devices some of the primary constraints of mobile computing, such as battery life and hardware with less computational power, could be resolved by moving complex operations and computations to the cloud. This thesis aims to identify advantages and disadvantages associated with running cloud based applications on mobile devices. We also present a study of the power consumption of five cloud based mobile applications and compare the results to their non-cloud counterparts. The results from the experiment show that migrating all your applications to the cloud will not significantly reduce the power consumption of your mobile device at the moment, but that mobile cloud computing has matured within the last year and will continue doing so with the development of cloud computing.