AppaaS: offering mobile applications as a cloud service

With the huge number of offerings in the mobile application market, the choice of mobile applications that best fit particular objectives is challenging. Therefore, there is a demand for a platform elevating the momentum of mobile applications that can adapt their behavior according to the user's context. This paper proposes AppaaS, a context-aware platform that provides mobile applications as a service. AppaaS uses several types of context information including location information, user profile, device profile, user ratings, and time to provision the best relevant mobile applications to such a context. AppaaS supports state preservation, where user-specific data and application status are stored for the user's future reference. Experimental validation demonstrates that AppaaS alleviates the burden on mobile users to find applications that work best for a particular situation. It also enables application providers to dynamically control access to the functionality of their applications. Performance evaluation results show that AppaaS can employ cloud elastic resource provisioning to offer flexible scalability, while satisfying certain QoS constraints. Experimental results also support a conclusion that with little overhead handling context information, AppaaS can bring remarkable benefits to provisioning mobile applications as a service.