Utilizing Cloud Computing in Developing a Mobile Location-Aware Tourist Guide System

Cloud Computing technologies support mobile applications and overcome the low computation resources and limited data storage by providing an on-demand access with pay-as-use rule to large number of computing resources. In this paper, the author describes the architecture of an electronic tourist guide system (Trip@Cloud) as mobile cloud computing application wherein the tourists can access cloudy information in ubiquitous and pervasive manner. The information needs not to be over the user's mobile device, but it will be downloaded to user's device according to user's location and the Internet status connection. The interaction between the mobile device and the cloud is done when possible and transparently from the user. The existing architectures of partitioning the application between the device and the cloud depends deeply on the CPU workloads. The author’s application's nature is different from these applications and this represents the main contribution. The idea is to download the data to the user's device according to the current user location. Therefore the partitioning is done for the data to be sent to the mobile device. This idea is applied by developing a tourist guide application where the data to be installed is very huge and the mobile storage device is very limited.