What is Mobile Cloud Computing?

What is Mobile Cloud Computing? How resource-constraint mobile devices utilize the computational resources from cloud computing to the end user? In June 2013, IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine published a Special Issue on Mobile Cloud Computing with an article named GEARING RESOURCE-POOR MOBILE DEVICES WITH POWERFUL CLOUDS: ARCHITECTURES, CHALLENGES, AND APPLICATIONS authored by Fangming Liu, Peng Shu, Hai Jin, Linjie Ding, Jie Yu, Di Niu, Bo Li; where the main concept of Mobile Cloud Computing was made clear – Rather than running applications locally and directly requesting data from content providers, a mobile device can offload parts of their workload to the cloud, taking advantage of the abundant cloud resources to help gather, store, and process data for the mobile device.

What is Mobile Cloud Computing?

Mobile Cloud Computing is abbreviated as MCC, which is a combination of cloud computing, mobile computing and the wireless network protocols which brings the rich computational resources to end users of the mobile devices to enable execution of rich mobile applications on a plethora of mobile devices. In short, Mobile Cloud Computing provides business opportunities for mobile network operators and the cloud computing service providers.The resources of varied cloud computing service models and networking protocols toward the functionality, storage and mobility to serve a multitude of tasks based on the pay-as-you-use principle.

Mobile Cloud Computing refer to the architecture where mobile devices obtain services from a traditional data center as a centralized cloud. The cloud resource remains in the remote centralized cloud infrastructure. To access data center resources, mobile devices usually access the backbone network via WiFi access points (APs) or 3G/4G cellular networks. The “cloud” here acts as an agent between the original content providers and mobile devices. Rather than running applications locally and directly requesting data from content pro- viders, a mobile device which can offload parts of workload to the cloud, taking advantage of the abundant resources to help gather, store, and process data for the mobile device.

Being cross-platform in nature, web applications prevails. With the development of mobile browsers, rich web applications implemented with HTML5 and JavaScript can now function properly on the mobile devices. Applications like web games utilize advanced techniques like canvas, 3D transform, and complex program logic in JavaScript to realize dazzling visual effects and an interactive user experience. However, graphic rendering and JavaScript interpretation are energy-consuming.

What Are the Capabillity Extensions of Mobile Cloud Computing?

Computational Capability : Google Voice Search, Apple Siri are the examples.

Storage ” Another class of popular mobile cloud applications aims to extend storage.

Networking ” The popularity of mobile devices places higher requirements on network availability and stability. Like, Cloud Torrent employs the cloud as an agent between content providers and mobile devices.