The Next Paradigm Shift in the Mobile Ecosystem: Mobile Social Computing and the Increasing Relevance of Users

Social computing has become the paradigm for the increasingly relevant role of users in the Internet world. In this paper, it is argued that mobile social computing will eventually cause an even bigger impact in the mobile ecosystem. We are already at the beginning of the "transference" of a significant part of Internet social computing usage to the mobile domain, where users are no longer passive consumers of content andapplications, but co-creators and even innovators of them. However, mobile social computing will go one step further in the contribution to the development of the mobile ecosystem, since it will put the many situations of users' daily activities at the centre stage. To prove this case, this paper gathers available data and evidence on the patterns of mobile social computing usage and discusses user innovation and user empowerment in the framework of the current mobile ecosystem.Mobile social computing, user innovation, mobile ecosystem.

When Mobile Blockchain Meets Edge Computing

Blockchain, as the backbone technology of the current popular Bitcoin digital currency, has become a promising decentralized data management framework. Although blockchain has been widely adopted in many applications, e.g., finance, healthcare, and logistics, its application in mobile services is still limited. This is due to the fact that blockchain users need to solve preset proof-of-work puzzles to add new data, i.e., a block, to the blockchain. Solving the proof-of-work, however, consumes substantial resources in terms of CPU time and energy, which is not suitable for resource-limited mobile devices. To facilitate blockchain applications in future mobile Internet of Things systems, multiple access mobile edge computing appears to be an auspicious solution to solve the proof-of-work puzzles for mobile users. We first introduce a novel concept of edge computing for mobile blockchain. Then, we introduce an economic approach for edge computing resource management. Moreover, a prototype of mobile edge computing enabled blockchain systems is presented with experimental results to justify the proposed concept.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Communications Magazin

How mobility increases mobile cloud computing processing capacity

In this paper, we address a important and still unanswered question in mobile cloud computing ``how mobility impacts the distributed processing power of network and computing clouds formed from mobile ad-hoc networks ?''. Indeed, mobile ad-hoc networks potentially offer an aggregate cloud of resources delivering collectively processing, storage and networking resources. We demonstrate that the mobility can increase significantly the performances of distributed computation in such networks. In particular, we show that this improvement can be achieved more efficiently with mobility patterns that entail a dynamic small-world network structure on the mobile cloud. Moreover, we show that the small-world structure can improve significantly the resilience of mobile cloud computing services