Advances in Mobile Cloud Computing

Recently the cloud computing technology has emerged as a new information technology infrastructure for the fast developing IT industry. In cloud computing, information is permanently stored in large-scale data centers on the Internet all over the world and temporarily accessed and cached on clients including desktops and portable PCs, sensors, etc. With the “cloud” as a metaphor for the Internet, cloud computing promises to deliver massively scalable IT-enabled data, software, and hardware capabilities as a service to external clients with Internet accesses. And the highly scalable computation capability of the cloud data centers can further assist and accelerate most of our computation intensive services and works effectively. Therefore the cloud computing has been envisioned as the key technology to achieve economies of scale in the deployment and operation of IT solutions. Regarding recent advances in mobile communication technologies, a new wave of user demands for rich mobile service experience has been fueled. Mobile users always expect broadband Internet access wherever they go, interact with each other via social networks while moving; furthermore, they are seeking ubiquitous access to a wealth of media-based contents and services. Because mobile devices are resource limited inherently, it is essential for the cloud to provide computational support for many media-rich applications. The combination of mobile media and cloud computing highly arises many technical challenges, and the fundamental tension between resource-hungry multimedia streams and power-limitedmobile devices has to be resolved. The effort for providing a universal rich-media experience across any screen is typically hindered by the heterogeneity amongst ever-evolving mobile devices, as manifested in their different physical form factors, middleware platforms, and interactive functions. Furthermore the developments of innovative pervasive mobile services, e.g., mobile video streaming, rich media dissemination, surveillance, gaming, e-health care, etc., can be greatly facilitated by Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) platform employing emerged and emerging technologies. This issue consists of five papers addressing the various aspects ofMCC, such as mobile cloud computing services and applications, mobile cloud gaming, integration of MCC with Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), as well as the relationship between cloud computing and big data. The issue opens with a comprehensive survey on diverse ways of combining cloud computing and mobile platforms towards a new computing/ communications paradigm. In “Mobile Cloud Computing: A Survey, State of Art and Future Directions”, M. R. Rahimi et al. provided a complete survey on the field of MCC on its state of art applications, research challenges, opportunities and future research directions. The typical MCC applications are discussed, such as mobile learning, commerce, healthcare and social networks. The authors further identify research gaps from three critical aspects from enhancing the efficiency of task offloading to improve the business model, and the research challenges and opportunities are made clear within the context of the existing schemes. In the paper “ACloudlet-AssistedMultiplayer Cloud Gaming System” by W. Cai et al., the authors proposed a novel cloudlet-assisted multiplayer cloud gaming system, in which the mobile devices are connected to the cloud server for realtime interactive game videos, while sharing the received video M. Chen (*) Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Room 410, Building Southern No. 1, 1037 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430074, China e-mail: minchen@ieee.org