Mobile devices are gaining high popularity due to support for a wide range of applications. However, the mobile devices are resource constrained and many applications require high resources. To cater to this issue, the researchers envision usage of mobile cloud computing technology which offers high performance computing, execution of resource intensive applications, and energy efficiency. This chapter highlights importance of mobile devices, high performance applications, and the computing challenges of mobile devices. It also provides a brief introduction to mobile cloud computing technology, its architecture, types of mobile applications, computation offloading process, effective offloading challenges, and high performance computing application on mobile devises that are enabled by mobile cloud computing technology.
TopCloud Computing
Cloud computing is a coalesce of many computing fields and is widely used in multiple domains (A. R. Khan, Othman, Madani, & Khan, 2014). By using cloud computing, small businesses can expand their IT resources based on service demands and avail equal opportunities of growth to compete with other businesses within the market. Cloud Computing has gained much popularity in the recent years due to features, such as virtually unlimited resources, low capital cost, ease of adoption, flexible resource provisioning, and high scalability (A. R. Khan, Othman, Xia, & Khan, 2015).
The cloud platform has three main layers, namely IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service). In most cases, the cloud layers are more of a pyramid structure where IaaS has enormous resources, PaaS runs a smaller number of software development frameworks and tools, and SaaS runs a number of applications that use the underlying resources and functionality (Hassan, 2011). Figure 1 shows the execution support and example services of each layer.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service
In IaaS layer, the computer infrastructure is provided as a service. IaaS provides guaranteed processing power, storage and bandwidth. The computation power and storage is provided in form of VM image executing on virtualized server(s) that can achieve guaranteed quality-of-service, irrespective of Operating System (OS) used. Some of the well-known IaaS platforms include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) (Amazon, 2015) and Rackspace (Rackspace, 2015). In EC2, users can create a particular Virtual Machine (VM) with specific hardware resource requirements and deploy the required OS and applications on top of the VM. The users can also upload their own VM image with pre-installed OS and applications. IaaS services are usually billed on usage basis (also known as utility computing), where users pay only for what they use (computation, storage and bandwidth).