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

1

Motivation

Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.

Julius Sextus Frontinus, highly regarded Roman engineer, 1st century A.D.

This chapter serves as a motivating introduction to the subject of this book: mobile clouds. A brief account of the evolution of mobile and wireless communications is presented from the point of view of mobile devices as well as communication networks. Mobile clouds can be considered as the result of the evolution and merging of mobile and wireless communications technologies. These initial pages will shed some light on some historical developments leading to the concept of mobile clouds.

1.1 Introduction

Untethered communications, omnipresent and fundamental in today’s hyper-connected world, evolved rapidly in the last decades. The impact on our lives is so deep that it is hard to imagine how difficult it would be living now without the informational and social connectivity, freedom as well as flexibility brought by wireless communications technology. In this introduction we briefly discuss the evolutionary development of wireless communications until the present, from networks and mobile devices points of view. This overview will provide some useful and motivating background information before focusing on mobile clouds. Two evolutionary paths characterize untethered communications, the developments in wide–area communications on one hand, and the developments in short–range communications on the ...