Mobile Video Cloud Networks

Mobile multimedia computing has become ubiquitous in everyday life. However, mobile device users involved in resource-demanding visual applications such as video streaming often encounter performance degradations due to their mobile devices’ intrinsic constraints in processing power, storage, and battery capacity. Cloud computing can be explored to circumvent such problems thanks to the vast resources available in the cloud. Mobile video cloud computing has thus emerged as an important research and development topic to achieve high-performance, innovative networked video applications. This chapter discusses the recent advances in mobile video cloud technologies and applications. The authors investigate mobile video cloud systems starting with the various mobile cloud paradigms and then present challenges and solutions of mobile video cloud management for mobility, context, and security. Furthermore, the authors examine the latest video coding standards and explore methods based on parallelisation and scalability for their optimised application over mobile clouds, followed by three highlighted mobile cloud video applications including streaming, transcoding, and gaming. Finally, future directions in this area are envisioned.