A Review on Distributed Application Processing Frameworks in Smart Mobile Devices for Mobile Cloud Computing

The latest developments in mobile devices technology have made smartphones as the future computing and service access devices. Users expect to run computational intensive applications on Smart Mobile Devices (SMDs) in the same way as powerful stationary computers. However in spite of all the advancements in recent years, SMDs are still low potential computing devices, which are constrained by CPU potentials, memory capacity and battery life time. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the latest practical solution for alleviating this incapacitation by extending the services and resources of computational clouds to SMDs on demand basis. In MCC, application offloading is ascertained as a software level solution for augmenting application processing capabilities of SMDs. The current offloading algorithms offload computational intensive applications to remote servers by employing different cloud models. A challenging aspect of such algorithms is the establishment of distributed application processing platform at runtime which requires additional computing resources on SMDs. This paper reviews existing Distributed Application Processing Frameworks (DAPFs) for SMDs in MCC domain. The objective is to highlight issues and challenges to existing DAPFs in developing, implementing, and executing computational intensive mobile applications within MCC domain. It proposes thematic taxonomy of current DAPFs, reviews current offloading frameworks by using thematic taxonomy and analyzes the implications and critical aspects of current offloading frameworks. Further, it investigates commonalities and deviations in such frameworks on the basis significant parameters such as offloading scope, migration granularity, partitioning approach, and migration pattern. Finally, we put forward open research issues in distributed application processing for MCC that remain to be addressed.