Mobile cloud computing [Guest Edotorial]

obile Cloud Computing refers to an infrastructure where both the data storage and the data processing occur outside of the mobile device. Mobile cloud applications move the computing power and data storage away from mobile devices and into the cloud, bringing applications and mobile computing not only to smartphone users but also to a much broader range of mobile subscribers. Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm for cost efficient and reliable service provisioning. Today, the rich availability of energy-harvesting and resource-constrained mobile computing devices is beginning to converge with the great opportunity offered by the powerful cloud computing services hosted by virtualized data center resources. Although mobile applications, cloud computing, and data center networking techniques have been intensively investigated in the past couple of years, mobile cloud computing and mobile cloud networking have not raised the attention of the research community until recently. In this feature topic we are pleased to introduce a series of state-of-the-art papers on this specific area. These articles cover the subject from a variety of perspectives, offering the readers an understanding of mobile cloud computing. A total of five papers were finally selected for this feature topic out of 33 submissions after a strict peer review process. They cover a broad range of the field of mobile cloud computing. While some articles focus on understanding the challenges and potential ways for improving the mobile cloud computing architectures and mechanisms like mobile code offloading, cloudlets and mobility, others suggest complimenting or applying the state-of-the-art mobile cloud computing technique, e.g. leveraging mobile devices' crowdsourcing and computation capabilities in accessing mobile cloud services. An important trend occuring in the area of mobile cloud computing is the geographical distribution of cloud facilities, with the deployment of small-size data-centers to form local-area clouds. In the first article, " An Open Ecosystem for Mobile-Cloud Convergence, " Satya-narayanan et al. discuss how the emergence of Cloudlets, local-area cloud solutions at or close to the premises of cloud users, can improve the user experience and argue how their deployment practices shall follow openness and neutrality principles. The citizens' locations and movement patterns in daily life are of high relevance to many applications such as city planning, traffic control and personalized recommendations. In the second article of this feature topic, " Estimating Users' Home and Work Locations Leveraging Large-scale Crowd-sourced Smartphone Data, " Liu et al. utilize crowd-sourcing techniques to collect mobile users' location …