Mobile Cloud Computing: Layered Architecture

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) holds a new dawn of computing, where multiple services are attracted to the cloud users through the internet. MCC has a qualitative, flexible and cost effective delivery platform for providing services to mobile cloud users with the aid of internet. Due to advent of MCC, capabilities of mobile devices have been improved. Now, mobile devices are dependent on cloud based computing and information storage resources, to carryout complex computational operations, which includes multimedia, searching and data mining. While addressing the limitations of mobile devices through MCC, various issues related to the efficient operation of MCC including security, quality of services and application development for mobile devices and offloading have been originated. Recently, the issues of MCC have witnessed significant attentions from industries and academia due to the huge potential to reduce computing cost and to ease the availability of computing power in mobile devices. Various proposals have been made to address the issues of MCC. The previous architectures have not define the user phase and the different communication technology protocols. In this context, this paper qualitatively reviews MCC focusing on layered architecture. Specifically, a five-layered architecture for MCC is proposed including task application, perception, network infrastructure, Internet and communication and computation layer. Each of the architecture layer components are critically investigated considering the previous literatures on MCC architectures. Thus, this study will be beneficial to the MCC domain.