Guohong Cao Mobile Web Browsing Using the Cloud

This chapter introduces the technical challenges arising from supporting web browsing on smartphones. For ease of understanding and further discussions, we briefly describe existing techniques on reducing the access delay and power consumption of smartphones. Then, we propose a new architecture, called Virtual Machine-based Proxy (VMP), which aims to shift the computationally intensive web browsing tasks from smartphones to reduce the delays and power consumption. Finally, we highlight the advantages of the VMP architecture and provide detailed organization of the book. Due to the arrival in the market of a new generation of improved smartphones, with large screens, improved user interfaces, and advanced features such as GPS, smartphones have become a key element in providing greater user access to the mobile Internet. For several years, the demand for smartphones has outpaced the remainder of the mobile phone market. Approximately half of the U.S. mobile consumers own smartphones and could account for nearly 70% of all U.S. mobile devices in 2013 [1]. Different from traditional mobile phones, smartphones incorporate mobile operating systems such as Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS, or others, leading to more capability than traditional mobile phones. Many complex applications which used to be limited to Personal Computers (PCs), have been developed and operated on smartphones. These applications extend the functionalities of smartphones, making them more convenient for users to connect to the Internet; however, the trade-off for greater capability is a greatly increased workload leading to increased power consumption. Smartphones, powered by battery, create a major concern for the battery’s life in the mobile communication industry. Unfortunately, the rate at which battery performance improves has been much slower than the development of the devices’ capabilities [2]. Aside from major breakthroughs, significant improvement in the foreseeable future is doubtful. Rather than improving the amount of energy a power source contains, this research explores an alternative: carefully designing B. Zhao et al., Mobile Web Browsing Using the Cloud, 1 SpringerBriefs in Computer Science, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-8103-4_1, © The Author(s) 2014