Recent advances and challenges in human-centric multimedia mobile cloud computing

The increasing usage of cloud computing, along with the proliferation of mobile devices and the demand for multimedia services, are changing the life style of users and creating new opportunities to providers and clients. Multimedia data will account for up to 90% of all Internet traffic in a few years, where most of the content will be created, shared, and accessed by mobile smartphones/tablets (carried by humans or placed in vehicles). However, this novel mobile multimedia era imposes new challenges for the networks, content, terminals, and humans, and must overcome problems associated, for instance, with high congestion, low scalability, fast battery consumption, and poor user experience. This paper discusses recent advances and challenges in human-centric mobile multimedia cloud computing approaches. On the one hand, Internet cloud will ubiquitously enrich multimedia mobile environments with more advanced and powerful features, including high processing and memory, scalability, availability, and adaptability. On the other hand, mobile devices will efficiently cooperate with each other to form mobile clouds that offload the Internet clouds from tasks that the latter cannot perform in a timely or efficient manner, including video and resource sharing. Both Internet and mobile clouds will be efficiently used to adapt/optimize multimedia flows to a single user or a group of users according to the current network conditions, context-awareness, content characteristics, device capabilities, and human experience.