Mobile phones and cloud computing : A quantitative research paper on mobile phone application offloading by cloud computing utilization

Abstract: The development of the mobile phone has been rapid. From being a device mainly usedfor phone calls and writing text messages the mobile phone of today, or commonlyreferred to as the smartphone, has become a multi-purpose device. Because of its size andthermal constraints there are certain limitations in areas of battery life andcomputational capabilities. Some say that cloud computing is just another buzzword, away to sell already existing technology. Others claim that it has the potential to transformthe whole IT-industry. This thesis is covering the intersection of these two fields byinvestigating if it is possible to increase the speed of mobile phones by offloadingcomputational heavy mobile phone application functions by using cloud computing. Amobile phone application was developed that conducts three computational heavy tests.The tests were run twice, by not using cloud computing offloading and by using it. Thetime taken to carry out the tests were saved and later compared to see if it is faster to usecloud computing in comparison to not use it. The results showed that it is not beneficial touse cloud computing to carry out these types of tasks; it is faster to use the mobile phone.