Mobile Clouds: Exploiting Distributed Resources in Wireless, Mobile and Social Networks

Foreword

The penetration of mobile technology into our society in recent years is remarkable. It has enabled enormous levels of always–available connectivity to the world's population with untold benefits and capabilities. This book on Mobile Clouds lays it all out. It is written at an easily accessible level for engineers, researchers and students without the burden of heavy mathematics, but rather with a superb descriptive approach that encourages full understanding of the key issues, the basic solutions, the advantages of those solutions, the direction in which the field is moving, and a presentation of its impact. This is a highly readable, intuitively pleasing and most enjoyable presentation of the emerging world of Mobile Clouds.

The trajectory of the development of Mobile Clouds has been one of wireless communications leading to mobile telephony, which has evolved into always–available voice and data access. The tremendous success of these technologies is placing severe strains on the underlying resources needed to continue the growth and deployment of new users, new applications, and new services. In response, as this book explains, there is a growing need for sharing of resources while at the same time improving the efficiency of spectrum use and energy consumption. The seeds for these improvements came from two parallel developments in the early history of mobile access, both beginning in the early 1970's. One development is that with which the public is so familiar, ...