Mobile cloud computing promises several benefits such as extra battery life and storage, scalability, and reliability. However, there are still challenges that must be addressed in order to enable the ubiquitous deployment and adoption of mobile cloud computing. Some of these challenges include security, privacy and trust, bandwidth and data transfer, data management and synchronization, energy efficiency, and heterogeneity. We present a thorough overview of mobile cloud computing and differentiate it from traditional cloud computing. Also presented here is a generic architecture that evaluates 30 recently proposed mobile cloud computing research architectures (i.e., published since 2010). This is achieved by utilizing a set of assessment criteria. Finally, we discuss future research challenges that require further attention.

Introduction

Over the past few years, mobile cloud computing has been changing the landscape of traditional mobile computing by providing on-demand, self-service, measured, elastic, and broad access mobile services. Mobile cloud computing devices such as smartphones and tablets are becoming a significant part of our modern and virtual lifestyle. For example, the number of smartphone and tablet shipments has grown exponentially and by 2016 reached 1.9 billion units globally according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Smart Connected Device Tracker (Meulen, 2016). The mobile cloud computing paradigm emerged as a way to combine the benefits of mobile computing (Dinh et al., 2011) with those of cloud computing (Fernando et al., 2013) in order to better employ datacenters’ computing capabilities and deliver them as mobile services. For mobile computing, mobile devices are designed with limited hardware, software, and communication capabilities with mobility being the major criteria. Regarding cloud computing, massive computing capabilities are delivered as services using virtualization and service oriented techniques to reduce cost, improve performance, or allow remote access. Mobile cloud computing enables large and powerful computing capabilities to be delivered as services. This allows mobile devices with limited resources to perform complex computations that require more powerful computing resources. Although mobile cloud computing can offer several important benefits such as extended battery life and higher storage, scalability, and reliability, several key challenges continue to be a major impediment to mobile cloud computing adoption. These challenges include security and privacy, bandwidth and data transfer, data management and synchronization, energy efficiency, and heterogeneity that need to be resolved. We also need to address such challenges in order to enable mobile cloud service consumers to enjoy the advantages of mobile cloud computing. Traditional cloud computing approaches might not be adequate for the current mobile cloud computing environment due to their limited connectivity, energy constraints, and distributed nature (Fernando et al., 2013; Dinh et al., 2011; Kovachev et al., 2011). In this study, we compare and contrast traditional cloud computing with mobile cloud computing. We compare 26 recent surveys (i.e., published from 2010 to the present day) on mobile cloud computing by highlighting their focus; the components of the proposed architecture for mobile cloud computing if there is any, expressing their contributions, identifying the analysis technique used to determine research challenges for mobile cloud computing and describe these challenges. Moreover, we propose a generic architecture that covers all layers of mobile cloud computing to identify the relevant issues.