1111 Copyright © 2016, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 49 DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-9466-8.ch049 Operational Cost of Running Real-Time Mobile Cloud Applications ABSTRACT This chapter describes the concepts and cost models used for determining the cost of providing cloud services to mobile applications using diferent pricing models. Two recently implemented mobile-cloud applications are studied in terms of both the cost of providing such services by the cloud operator, and the cost of operating them by the cloud user. Computing resource requirements of both applications are identifed and worksheets are presented to demonstrate how businesses can estimate the operational cost of implementing such real-time mobile cloud applications at a large scale, as well as how much cloud operators can proft from providing resources for these applications. In addition, the nature of available service level agreements (SLA) and the importance of quality of service (QoS) specifcations within these SLAs are emphasized and explained for mobile cloud application deployment. INTRODUCTION Cloud is the platform of multiple servers over a widely disbursed geographic area, connected by the Internet for the purpose of serving data or computation (Bansal, 2013). Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) can be described as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network ac- cess to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (Shanklin, 2014) from mobile devices. MCC therefore refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and system software in datacenters that provide those services. The services them- Ovunc Kocabas University of Rochester, USA Regina Gyampoh-Vidogah Independent Researcher, UK Tolga Soyata University of Rochester, USA