Towards Pervasive Computing Environments with Cloud Services

Pervasive computing aims at creating environments saturated with embedded and portable computing devices surrounding the users and providing them with many interesting services. It has been gradually applied into our everyday life and its applications are becoming more and more extensive day by day. However, exploiting its full potential is difficult due to some inherent problems such as limited scalability of users and devices, limited availability of software applications, resources scarceness in embedded gadgets, and frequent disconnection and finite energy of mobile devices. Consequently, a wide range of applications such as image processing, multimedia, and social networking are difficult to run in pervasive computing environments. Cloud Computing (CC) platforms possess the ability to overcome these discrepancies with their scalable, highly available and resource pooling computing capabilities. In this paper, we examine how interesting characteristics of CC can contribute to solve some inherent problems in pervasive computing environments. We propose an infrastructure and a protocol that incorporate pervasive computing environments with cloud services and show that by embedding the power of CC services into pervasive computing environments we can significantly enhance services provided by these environments.