Mobile Cloud Networking: Lessons Learnt, Open Research Directions, and Industrial Innovation Opportunities

This keynote speech has the ambition of overviewing some primary lessons learnt and most promising directions for future research/innovation activities in the area of Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN). In the following, the MCN term is specifically used to indicate the exploitation of cloud resources and infrastructures (possibly distributed and federated) to sustain and provision mobility-enabled services to mobile devices, with significant advantages in terms of both cost/investment reduction for mobile infrastructure providers and additional innovative (functional and non-functional) features generated by infrastructure virtualization. Let me note that this definition does not include other potential forms of "mobile clouds" that can combine the innovation directions of mobility and cloud, e.g., exploiting richer and richer mobile devices as cloud-like virtual resources, for instance in the so-called vehicular clouds [1]. The latter approaches are considered out of the scope of this paper and presentation.