State of the Art: Mobile Cloud Computing

Today, mobile devices such as smartphones, and tablets, have become primary computing devices for many users, replacing the conventional PCs. However, mobile devices have limited capabilities due to the computation power, memory, storage, and energy. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) will overcome these obstacles and will provide services to mobile users by offloading tasks and data on the Internet, rather than on individual devices, and will provide resources to a local client on demand. In parallel, the latest 4G wireless network technology, LTE/LTE-Advanced has just been rolled out in commercial use. The system characteristics of 4G and beyond 4G systems (5G) are high data rate (throughput), low latency (delay), high mobility (speed), and high capacity. These technological enhancements are expected to deliver new innovative multimedia services and applications that will benefit both end users and businesses. However many issues remain to be solved before mobile cloud computing could reach its true potential. The main obstacles are: battery life-time, interaction latency, Quality of Service/Experience (QoS/QoE), and seamless mobility. This paper provides a survey of the MCC including definition, architecture, services and applications, current research trends and issues, as well as future research directions of MCC.