Mobile Cloud Computing: Taxonomy and Challenges

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) holds a new dawn of computing, where the cloud users are attracted to multiple services through the Internet. MCC has a qualitative, flexible, and cost-effective delivery platform for providing services to mobile cloud users with the aid of the Internet. Due to the advantage of the delivery platform, several studies have been conducted on how to address different issues in MCC. The issues include energy efficiency in MCC, secured MCC, user-satisfied applications and Quality of Service-aware MCC (QoS). In this context, this paper qualitatively reviews different proposed MCC solutions. Therefore, taxonomy for MCC is presented considering major themes of research including energy-aware, security, applications, and QoS-aware developments. Each of these themes is critically investigated with comparative assessments considering recent advancements. Analysis of metrics and implementation environments used for evaluating the performance of existing techniques are presented. Finally, some open research issues and future challenges are identified based on the critical and qualitative assessment of literature for researchers in this field.