Android as a server platform

Abstract

The number of smartphone users and mobile applications are growing rapidly. Though smartphones are expected to have PC-like functionality, hardware resources such as CPUs, memory and batteries are still limited. To solve this resource problem, many researches have proposed architectures to use server resources in the cloud for mobile devices. We propose a conceptual architecture of Android as a Server Platform, which enables multiple user Android applications on cloud server via network. Though Android is mainly designed for physical smartphone, Android's two other features are useful to construct a server platform. Android is open-source product and runs on an ×86 CPU. We show three types of multi-tenant architecture for an Android server platform and discuss the direction to take to it reality.