  The success of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in multiple disciplines and
vertical domains in recent years has promoted the evolution of mobile
networking and the future Internet toward an AI-integrated Internet-of-Things
(IoT) era. Nevertheless, most AI techniques rely on data generated by physical
devices (e.g., mobile devices and network nodes) or specific applications
(e.g., fitness trackers and mobile gaming). To bypass this circumvent,
Generative AI (GAI), a.k.a. AI-generated content (AIGC), has emerged as a
powerful AI paradigm; thanks to its ability to efficiently learn complex data
distributions and generate synthetic data to represent the original data in
various forms. This impressive feature is projected to transform the management
of mobile networking and diversify the current services and applications
provided. On this basis, this work presents a concise tutorial on the role of
GAIs in mobile and wireless networking. In particular, this survey first
provides the fundamentals of GAI and representative GAI models, serving as an
essential preliminary to the understanding of the applications of GAI in mobile
and wireless networking. Then, this work provides a comprehensive review of
state-of-the-art studies and GAI applications in network management, wireless
security, semantic communication, and lessons learned from the open literature.
Finally, this work summarizes the current research on GAI for mobile and
wireless networking by outlining important challenges that need to be resolved
to facilitate the development and applicability of GAI in this edge-cutting
area.
