As we have seen the rapid advancement of cloud computing in the last few years, there is another technology area observing tremendous growth. It is not to mention that mobile technology has gained significant growth due to increased business and customer demands. Today every business offers an app-based facility. Moreover, the increased use of smartphones with enhanced network services generate a massive amount of data. This forces to handle massive data – both for storing and processing. Just imagine what happens when you run ten mobile apps at a time? You will undoubtedly end up with poor speed and performance issues, which is also not a good sign for business. Amalgamated with Cloud, mobile technology has found the solution for this, which is a substantial change in service offerings. Yes, you have guessed it right; it is Mobile Cloud computing (MCC) – an infrastructure that offloads the headache of data storage and data processing inside the mobile.

According to one statistic, the global mobile cloud market is estimated to grow up to $46.90 billion by 2019 at a CAGR of 37.8%. Interestingly, if you think more on a deeper level, this growth rate is because of multiple interests getting benefitted from it—for example, cloud vendors, mobile network operators, enterprises, consumers, and businesses. Last but not least, mobile cloud computing is an essential technology for mobile companies. To sell the product, the more data features like sensors data, location, streaming, syncing, etc., they can offer, the more business they can make.

However, the reason mentioned above is not the only one why we go for Mobile Cloud computing. In a nutshell, mobile cloud computing leverages the facilities in the below area of mobile devices and applications with the features of cloud computing.

Why Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is important

Mobile cloud computing helps to overcome the trouble areas which mobile devices usually face during usage. These are mainly resource-related challenges—for example, battery life problems, storage, and bandwidth issue. On the contrary, Mobile Cloud Computing addresses these issues by utilizing its infrastructure, platforms, and software provided by cloud providers at a low cost. Besides, Mobile cloud computing provides mobile users with processing services and data storage in the Cloud. As a result, it eliminates the need to have a powerful device configuration, including CPU speed and memory capacity. This is because all resource-intensive computing happens within the Cloud.

• As the data processing happens outside the mobile device, users get an extended battery life, which eliminates a big concern of the users.

• Due to external data processing, the memory consumption of the mobile device improves significantly, which in turn enhances the applications' speed.

• As mobile apps using cloud computing store data in the cloud, it is easy to access and good from a storage capacity point of view.

• Better synchronization

• Enhanced scalability

• Mobile cloud architecture facilitates data integration from various sources.

• Besides, it enables users to access real-time information through installed apps. This, in turn, increases productivity and flexibility if you consider professional usage purposes. Thus, it is one of the prime reasons for the escalating demands of mobile cloud computing.

• Better data security and the app's reliability for the uses as the data is backed up in the cloud. Hence, a very less chance of data loss.

• Developing mobile apps using cloud computing has become easier and faster.

As every cloud infrastructure offers many pre-built, pre-configured, and scalable services, the cloud run times help execute the business logic of mobile apps, which is known as Offloading. It works as a mobile backend as a service (MBaaS), which abstracts connecting mobile applications to the backend cloud storage for processing.

Vendors providing MBaaS platform

Vendor Name	MBaaS platform
Amazon	AWS Cognito
Google	FireBase
Microsoft	Azure Mobile Services
Salesforce	Combination of SalesForce.com and Heroku
Red Hat	Expected to combine the power of OpenShift and FeedHenry
Pivotal	CloudFoundy

Here are some facts on Cloud Foundry - Know some Facts on Cloud Foundry

Key components of Mobile Cloud Computing

Profiler – This component collects data execution time. Also, it monitors network traffic and power consumption.

Solver – The solver decides which parts of a mobile app run on Cloud and mobile.

Synchronizer –It combines the split executions and delivers the result to the users

Mobile Cloud computing architecture and its Programming models

Mobile cloud architecture consists of three components –

1.Regional Data Center (RDC) – This is cloud data center that have computers, security devices, power supplies, etc.

2.Wireless Core: This is wireless router used to connect users to the mobile networks

3.Base stations – Network stations

Image source: Slideshare

Programming Model Name	Features
Clone cloud	-Users retain full control of the cloud -Consists of solver, and profiler
MAUI	-Platform and language independent -Microsoft .NET framework based
Odessa	-Parallel processing framework Not suitable for existing framework
Orleans	-Ideal for scalable and elastic application -One of the best programming models for mobile cloud computing
RESTFUL	-Primarily used for media processing communications -Uses http or https protocols

Open areas of improvement in Mobile Cloud Computing

Although Mobile cloud computing is a well-researched and developed field, few highlighted improvement areas are working on.

• It needs a reference architecture for Heterogeneous mobile cloud computing. Hence it is an open architectural issue which is a source stopper towards unrestricted MCC

• Virtualization in mobile cloud computing is resource-intensive mobile application execution through a Virtual Machine. It needs a migration-based application. Also, it requires encapsulation at the VM level, which is a challenging task from the deployment point of view.

• As mobile data is increasing rapidly, avoiding communication congestion between cloud endpoints and mobile is a real challenge in the future.

• The piracy issue is a threat area for mobile cloud development.

Prime areas of usage of Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile learning (m‐learning)

• As the interest in e-Learning has surged at a high rate, people like to access it in a mobile mode using smartphones. However, streaming such learning modules or sometimes heavy set up demands more data storage and high processing speed. This becomes impossible without the use of mobile cloud computing.

Mobile commerce (m‐commerce)

• This is mainly used for financial activities and the purpose of advertisement and retailing. The prime intention of mobile commerce through mobile cloud computing is creating mobility for payment and messaging purposes.

Mobile healthcare (m‐healthcare)

• Mobile healthcare helps to overcome the traditional healthcare system's limitations from both patients' and healthcare management perspectives. Today mobile cloud computing makes it convenient to manage massive health records of patients or smart health monitoring systems through mobile devices.

Mobile game (m‐game)

• Multimedia mobile gaming apps are highly resourced intensive, and they consume high energy. Hence, an offloading game engine in the cloud saves a lot of energy and enhance performance.

However, security issues matter

Though the mobile cloud ecosystem leverages several benefits, there are some significant security and privacy issues. To explain more, in the mobile cloud computing space, privacy is the biggest challenge. As the user data is stored remotely, it is no surprise that third party companies can sell those data without the user's permission. Similarly, data security is a prime concern where malicious code is a threat. Users rarely use malware protection for their mobile devices, leading to data theft and information stealing.

To enhance security in enterprise mobile space, they include strong authentication methods so that only legitimate users can get access to data and services. Furthermore, it is not only about user-level authentication but also for embedded device identity protection. At that space, also device based personalize configuration is possible.

To conclude, mobile cloud computing is a revolutionary technology in mobile computing. Besides, it is playing a vital role in business economics. This is the current trend in mobile computing as well as cloud computing. Though there are few drawbacks, mobile computing has a promising future in enterprise businesses as they have easy access to data and server. As all these happen based on cloud computing, it may not incur huge costs. By implementing the right strategy, we can get the best level of benefits out of it.

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