Building mobile multimedia services: a hybrid cloud computing approach

Mobile multimedia services are in high demand, but their development comes at high costs. The emergent computing paradigm cloud computing has great potential to embrace these issues. In fact, we are at the early stage of the coalescence of cloud computing, mobile multimedia and the Web. Motivated by the tremendous success story of the Web based on its simplicity principles, we argue for a comprehensive review on current practices of web and mobile multimedia cloud computing techniques for avoiding frictions. We draw on experience from the development of advanced collaborative multimedia web applications utilizing multimedia metadata standards like MPEG-7 and real-time communication protocols like XMPP. We propose our i5CLoud, a hybrid cloud architecture, which serves as a substrate for scalable and fast time-to-market mobile multimedia services. This paper demonstrates the applicability of emerging cloud computing concepts for mobile multimedia.