International Journal of Internet and Distributed Systems, 2013, 1, 17-17
http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ijids.2013.13003 Published Online August 2013 (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ijids)
Editorial: When the Cloud Computing Becomes Mobile!
Al-Sakib Khan Pathan
Department of Computer Science, International Islamic University Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Received May 26, 2013; revised June 26, 2013; accepted July 5, 2013
Copyright © 2013 Al-Sakib Khan Pathan. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Handheld computing devices are now almost everywhere
at the hands of technology dependent people of all ages.
This rapid expansion of the number of mobile computing
users has given rise of various research topics. Both the
academia and the industries are looking for new ideas
how to best-utilize the mobile computing power at the
hands of consumers. While the technological advance-
ments are going on from both hardware and software
levels, novel concepts are also being introduced. One of
those concepts is Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC).
Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) basically refers to an
emerging infrastructure where both of the data storage
and the data processing happen outside the mobile device
from which an application is launched. By this time,
MCC is a widely accepted concept that can significantly
improve the user experience when accessing mobile ser-
vices. What MCC does is it expands the notion of mere
cloud computing. To define formally, the concept of
“Cloud” tells that the users are able to access ICT (In-
formation and Communication Technology) capabilities
from the Internet without knowledge of and full control
over the technology infrastructure that supports them.
When the users submit any task to the cloud, the exact
solution providers and underlying infrastructure are not
precisely enumerated. Hence, the users or clients in a
cloud service scenario can submit a computing task, such
as image processing or some heavy computation tasks, to
the service provider without actually possessing the re-
quired software or hardware. The client’s computer may
contain very little software or data (may be, a minimal
OS (operating system) and web brow ser only) , serving as
little more than a display terminal connected to the In-
ternet. As the cloud is the underlying delivery mecha-
nism of the client’s task requests and solution provider’s
response, cloud-based applications and services may sup-
port many types of software applications or services in
use today. When the same facility is given to the hand-
held mobile devices like Tablets or Smartphones or the
like, it becomes Mobile Cloud Computing—enabling
anytime, anywhere computing and storage.
As understood from the above definitions, MCC does
not basically make the cloud computing “mobile” but
rather it could be considered as a wireless extension of
cloud service facilities. All the wirelessly connected
computing devices use the wireless communication
technologies to access the Internet and thus, the resources
of the cloud to get the tasks done. This, being the essence
of the concept, when the actual cloud infrastructure re-
mains not-mobile, many challenges and issues come
forward. These challenges not only include the existing
challenges faced by traditional cloud computing like se-
curity, fair scheduling, resource availability, speed of
operation, etc. but also many kinds of issues that are pre-
sent in wireless communication technologies (e.g., wire-
less security, wireless infrastructure, channel access,
signal interference, and the like). Moreover, one core
issue is beyond the concepts and theories that is the
“battery lifetime” of the handheld mobile devices. All
mobile devices use batteries which are mostly recharge-
able. Though new technologies of recharging the batter-
ies are still under investigation, which commonly is
termed energy harvesting from various sources, the prac-
ticality is that still we need to use electricity, supplied by
wired connection. Given this aspect, the future of MCC’s
expansion lies on the advancements of battery technolo-
gies! This is one such example, where no theory or con-
cept may go beyond the practicality of physical imple-
mentation of things. We hope that future Mobile Cloud
Computing would get the required support from the
relevant researchers dealing with electrical and electron-
ics technologies—thus one’s action would help others to
grow with more novel ideas and concepts. May be
someday then it would be possible to embed the entire
cloud in mobile computing devices with long steady bat-
tery lifetime or lifetime provided by other sophisticated
technologies that are still unknown today.
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opyright © 2013 SciRes. IJIDS