Towards Distributed Mobile Computing

In the latest years, we observed an exponential growth of the market of the mobile devices. In this scenario, it assumes a particular relevance the rate at which mobile devices are replaced. According to the International Telecommunicaton Union in fact, smart-phone owners replace their device every 20 months, on average. The side effect of this trend is to deal with the disposal of an increasing amount of electronic devices which, in many cases, arestill working. We believe that it is feasible to recover such an unexploited computational power. Through a change of paradigm in fact, it is possible to achieve a two-fold objective: 1) extend the mobile devices lifetime, 2) enable a new opportunity to speed up mobile applications. In this paper we aim at providing a survey of state-of-art solutions aim at going in the direction of a Distributed Mobile Computing paradigm. We put in evidence the challenges to be addressed in order to implement this paradigm and we propose some possible future improvements.