Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC): Open Research Issues
Amit Kumar Sharma, Priyanka Soni · 2013
In the past few decades together with an explosive growth of the mobile applications and emerging of cloud computing concept has become one of the industry buzz words and a major discussion thread in the IT world since 2007. MCC integrates the cloud computing into the mobile environment and overcomes obstacles related to the performance (e.g., battery life, storage, and bandwidth), environment (e.g., heterogeneity, scalability, and availability), and security (e.g., reliability and privacy) in mobile computing. This paper shows the key open research issues associated with the mobile usage of cloud computing which helps general readers to have an overview of the MCC, their issues, existing solutions and approaches. In addition, some research aspects should be considered in further work. Index Term - Cloud Computing, Mobile Computing, heterogeneity, scalability and availability I. INTRODUCTION Mobile devices (e.g., Smartphone, Tablet Pcs, etc) are densely used in today's scenario and still get even more important since the usage of mobile Internet. The growth of the number of applications available for those devices in the last few years has shown that there is a high demand for mobile apps. However one common problem that those entire devices share still needs to be addressed that are limited capabilities of the devices regarding available resources like processor power, available memory and especially energy consumption. A technology recently emerged in the IT industry offers an opportunity to solve those problems. Cloud computing (CC) gives its users the possibility to host and deliver services over the Internet by dynamically providing computing resources. Cloud computing eliminates the requirement for users to plan ahead for acquiring different resources, such as storage and computing power, and therefore, is attractive to business owners. Moreover, enterprises can provide resources depending on service demand. In particular, resources can be dynamically added and released depending on service demand and with minimal management effort. The availability of cloud computing services in a mobile environment, also called mobile cloud computing, might thus be a possible solution for the earlier mentioned lack of resources of mobile devices. However research still needs to be done in order to solve several open issues like resource discovery, session connectivity, Data delivery, Task division, better service as well as possible frameworks to support cloud computing on mobile devices. This paper delivers an insight into how cloud-computing techniques can be used to support mobile devices and which open issues are associated with it. Moreover, this paper focuses on two of these open issues, i.e. mobility and resource discovery as well as mobility and session connectivity and shows how these open issues could effectively be solved.