After the Millennium, witnessed by milestone events such as Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service online in 2006, Utility Computing (2007), and a glut of active parties in the increasingly popular field of Cloud Computing (2008), etc., today, Cloud Computing generates over 100 million matches on Google. The scope of Cloud Computing grew from simple infrastructure services such as storage and calculation resources to include applications. However, this meant that forerunners such as application service providing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) would also henceforth be included under the designation of Cloud Computing.

At the bottom of these developments was the eventual shifting of IT services away from local computers to the Internet or, generally speaking, in networks. Eventually, Cloud Computing realized an idea that had already been hit upon by Sun Microsystems long before the Cloud Computing hype, i.e., The network will be the computer.

As shown in the above figure, existing technology such as grid computing, utility computing or adaptive computing marks the infrastructure path leading to Cloud Computing; application service providing and SaaS signifies the growth towards provision of programmes.

In present discussions about Cloud Computing, it is often ignored that high-performance networks represent an essential basis of the cloud construct. Consequently, the starting point of Cloud Computing would have to be linked with the development of the Internet. The various accesses to and views of Cloud Computing, and its respective origins led to differing definitions and to its strongly diverging public perception.

Cloud computing, including its offspring Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC), Fog Computing, Edge Clouds, etc., has a strong technical feature, known as “on-demand computing”, which is a kind of Internet- and mobile-based computing, where shared resources, data and information are provided to computers, mobiles, and other devices such as Internet of Things (IOT) on-demand. It is a model for enabling ubiquitous, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing, storage, and networking resources. Cloud computing, storage, and networking solutions provide users and enterprises with various capabilities to store and process their data in third-party data centers. MCC emerged with the proliferation of smart mobile devices 3/4/5G and ubiquitously accessible WiFi networks, and it was originally promoted by enabling cloud computing applications for mobile devices. Later Fog Computing and Edge Clouds target at establishing cloud services by harvesting edge networking devices, mobile devices, and IoT devices with a short communication distance, in which they mostly communicate through direct wireless communication channels and highly rely location-based services.

Recently, MCC has been evolved into a new paradigm compared to traditional Internet clouds, where MCC devices become more distributed and heterogeneous including not only high performance smart mobile devices but also lightweight IoT devices in home, vehicles, shopping centers, grocery stores, working places, etc. It brings out new challenges, especially for computing and networking services when facing vast number of IoT devices spread out in our physical and cyber environments. Mobile devices no longer just interact with clouds, they also can connect to various IoT devices to sense and recognize its situations for intelligent decisions. Mobile devices have become one of important interface for human to interact with both the physical and virtual worlds. In many applications, such as virtual reality, collaborative sensing, surveillance, and control, autonomous vehicles' platooning, etc., it is not sufficient for mobile devices only rely on Internet cloud. Powered by new wireless communication technologies, MCC relies on sharing of resources from Internet clouds, and neighboring mobile, sensing, computing, and storage devices, to achieve coherence and economies of scale, break barriers among different service communities, similar to a utility (like the electricity grid), however, over a heterogeneous networking environment. If we consider that each (or collective) IoT device provides a microservice, at the foundation of MCC is the broader concept of converged infrastructure and shared services.

In the first part of this book, we will focus on the foundation of MCC. Particularly, we first present concepts of MCC in Chapter 1, covering definitions, taxonomy, and applications of MCC. The definition of “Mobile” in MCC has also transited from its original meaning from “Mobile Device” to “mobile capability/features” in modern mobile devices involved services/applications, such as software, physical resource, location, service composition, etc., all can be “mobile” to meet an MCC application's need. To support such a mobility, virtualization is the most important enabling technology. Thus, in Chapter 2, we provide a comprehensive view of existing virtualization solutions to support such a mobility. Finally, in Chapter 3, a survey of existing MCC service models is presented.