(Vikas Kottari et al. / IJAIR Vol. 2 Issue 3 ISSN: 2278-7844) Abstract— The capabilities of mobile devices have been improving very quickly in terms of speed, computing power, storage, feature support, and real world user friendly applications. The worldwide shipments of smart phones are exceeding PCs in 2011 [1],and According to the top ten strategic technology trends for 2013 [2] provided by Gartner (a famous global analytical and consulting company), more users predicted to access the Internet from mobile devices than from PCs by 2013. Together with an explosive growth in the usage of smart phones, their applications and emerging of cloud computing concept, mobile cloud computing (MCC) has been introduced to be a potential technology for mobile services. 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. Although several striking research work has been conducted in the high computing counterparts of mobile technology, the field of cloud computing for mobile world is vastly unexplored. As MCC is still at the early stage of development, it is necessary to grasp a thorough understanding of the technology in order to point out the direction of future research. In this paper, we introduce the backg round and concept of Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC), applications and challenges in the area of MCC.

1. Vikas Kottari et al. / IJAIR Vol. 2 Issue 3 ISSN: 2278-7844
© 2013 IJAIR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
487
A Survey on Mobile Cloud Computing: Concept,
Applications and Challenges
Vikas Kottari#1
, Vishwanath Kamath G#2
, Lloyd Presley Saldanha#3
, Chandan Mohan#4
#
Computer Science and Engineering, Canara Engineering College, Mangalore, India
1
vikaskottari92@gmail.com
2
vishwa.kth@gmail.com
3
lldsaldanha@gmail.com
4
chandan.mohan16@gmail.com
Abstract— The capabilities of mobile devices have been improving
very quickly in terms of speed, computing power, storage,
feature support, and real world user friendly applications. The
worldwide shipments of smart phones are exceeding PCs in
2011 [1],and According to the top ten strategic technology
trends for 2013 [2] provided by Gartner (a famous global
analytical and consulting company), more users predicted to
access the Internet from mobile devices than from PCs by 2013.
Together with an explosive growth in the usage of smart phones,
their applications and emerging of cloud computing concept,
mobile cloud computing (MCC) has been introduced to be a
potential technology for mobile services.
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. Although several
striking research work has been conducted in the high
computing counterparts of mobile technology, the field of cloud
computing for mobile world is vastly unexplored. As MCC is
still at the early stage of development, it is necessary to grasp a
thorough understanding of the technology in order to point out
the direction of future research. In this paper, we introduce the
background and concept of Mobile Cloud Computing
(MCC), applications and challenges in the area of MCC.
Keywords— Mobile Cloud Computing, Mobile Computing, Cloud
Computing.
I. INTRODUCTION
Over the last few years, there has been an increased
number of applications that have migrated to the cloud, and
new cloud-based applications that have become popular.
As a major application model in the era of the Internet, Cloud
Computing has become a significant research topic of the
scientific and industrial communities since 2007. According
to the top ten strategic technology trends for 2012 [3]
provided by Gartner, cloud computing has been on the top
of the list, which means cloud computing will have an
increased impact on the enterprise and most organizations
in 2012.
The end mobile device user will eventually be the
benefactor of the Mobile Cloud Computing. Nature of cloud
applications also is advantageous for users since they do not
need to have very technical hardware to run applications as
these computing operations are run within the cloud. This
reduces the price of mobile computing to the end users. They
could see a huge number of new features enhancing
their phones due to Mobile Cloud Computing.
As an inheritance and development of cloud computing,
resources in mobile cloud computing networks are
virtualized and assigned in a group of numerous distributed
computers rather than in traditional local computers or
servers, and are provided to mobile devices such as
smartphones, portable ter- minal, and so on. (see Fig. 1).
Meanwhile, various applications based on mobile cloud
computing have been developed and served to users, such as
Googles Gmail, Maps and Navigation systems for Mobile,
Voice Search, and some applications on an Android
platform, MobileMe from Apple, Live Mesh from Microsoft,
and MotoBlur from Motorola. According to the research
from Juniper, the cloud computing based mobile software
and application are expected to rise 88% annually from 2009
to 2014, and such growth may create US 9.5 billion dollars in
2014.
Fig. 1: Mobile Cloud Computing
Mobile Devices
Servers and VMs
Internet(cloud)
Wireless access
Point
Radio Tower

2. Vikas Kottari et al. / IJAIR Vol. 2 Issue 3 ISSN: 2278-7844
© 2013 IJAIR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
488
II.BACKGROUND
As a development and extension of Cloud Computing
and Mobile Computing, Mobile Cloud Computing, as a new
phrase, has been devised since 2009. In order to help us
grasp- ing better understanding of Mobile Cloud Computing,
let’s start from the previous technique: Cloud Computing.
Cloud Computing
In the era of PC, many users found that the PCs they
bought 2 years ago cannot keep pace with the development of
software nowadays; they need a higher speed CPU, a larger
capacity hard disk, and a higher performance Operation
System (OS). Thus, a term called ’Cloud Computing’ burst
upon our lives.
Cloud Computing has become a popular phrase since
2007. However, there is no consensual definition on what a
Cloud Computing or Cloud Computing System is, due to
dozens of developers and organizations described it from
different perspectives. Techterms.com[4] gives a definition
of Cloud computing: Cloud computing refers
to applications and services offered over the Internet. These
services are offered from data canters all over the world,
which collectively are referred to as the "cloud." This
metaphor represents the intangible, yet universal nature of
the Internet. The idea of the "cloud" simplifies the many
network connections and computer systems involved
in online services.
1) Framework: Cloud computing systems actually can be
considered as a collection of different services, thus the
framework of cloud computing is divided into three layers,
which are infrastructure layer, platform layer, and application
layer as shown in Fig. 2.
2) Features: the features of Cloud Computing are as
follows:
a) Virtualization: The ’Cloud’ can be considered as a
virtual resource pool [5] where all bottom layer hardware de-
vices is virtualized. End users access desired resources
through a browser and get data from cloud computing
providers without maintaining their own data centres.
b) Reliability, usability and extensibility: Cloud comput-
ing provides a safe mode to store user’s data while users
do not worry about the issues such as software updating,
leak patching, virus attacks and data loss.
c) Large-scale: In order to possess the capability of
supercomputing and mass storage, a cloud computing
system normally consists of thousands of servers and PCs.
d) Autonomous System: Cloud computing systems are
autonomous systems managed transparently to users.
However, software and data inside clouds can be
automatically reconfigured and consolidated to a simple
platform depending on user’s needs.
3) Challenges: The new paradigm of cloud computing
provides an array of benefits and advantages over the
previous computing paradigms and many organizations are
migrating and adopting it. However, there are still a number
of challenges, which are currently addressed by researchers,
academicians and practitioners in the field.
a)Performance
The major issue in performance can be for some intensive
transaction-oriented and other data intensive applications, in
which cloud computing may lack adequate performance.
Also, users who are at a long distance from cloud providers
may experience high latency and delays.
b) Security and Privacy
Companies are still concerned about security when using
cloud computing. Users are worried about the
vulnerability to attacks, when information and critical IT
resources are outside the firewall.
d) Control
A quantity of IT wings or departments are concerned
because cloud computing providers have a full control of
the platforms. Cloud computing providers typically do
not design platforms for specific companies and their
business practices.
e) Bandwidth Costs
Cloud computing, companies can save money on hardware
and software; however they could incur higher network
bandwidth charges. Bandwidth cost may be low
for smaller Internet-based applications, which are not
virtualization
Fig. 2: The Framework of Cloud Computing
Parallel Programming Environment
Structured Data Management
Distribued File Sytem
Other System Management Tools
Client & agent
Physcal Hardware server & storage
Resource Pool Computing storage network
Various software service
SaaSPaaSIaaS
Internet (cloud)

3. Vikas Kottari et al. / IJAIR Vol. 2 Issue 3 ISSN: 2278-7844
© 2013 IJAIR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
489
data intensive, but could significantly grow for data-
intensive applications.
f) Reliability
Cloud computing still does not always offer round the
clock reliability. There were cases where cloud
computing services suffered few hours’ outages. In the
present and future days to expect more cloud computing
providers, richer services, established standards and best
practices.
III. MOBILE CLOUD COMPUTING
Nowadays, both hardware and software of mobile devices
get greater improvement than before, some smartphones
such as iPhone 5, Android serials, Windows Phone serials
and Blackberry, are no longer just traditional mobile phones
with conversation, SMS, Email and website browser, but are
daily necessities to users. Meanwhile, those smartphones
include various sensing modules like navigation, optics,
gravity, ori- entation, and so on. which brings a
convenient and intelli- gent mobile experience to users. In
2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt described mobile cloud
computing in an interview that ’based on cloud computing
service development, mobile phones will become
increasingly complicated, and evolve to a portable super
computer’ [6]. In the face of various mobile cloud services
provided by Microsoft, Apple, Google, HTC, and so on,
users may be confused about what mobile cloud computing
exactly is, and what its features are.
The Mobile Cloud Computing Forum [7] defines MCC
as “Mobile Cloud computing at its simplest refers to an
infrastructure where both the data storage and the data
processing happen outside of the mobile device. Mobile
cloud applications move the computing power and data
storage away from mobile phones and into the cloud,
bringing applications and mobile computing to not just
smart phone users but a much broader range of mobile
subscribers”.
A. Concept and principle
Similar with Cloud Computing, there are a lot but no
consensual definitions on what mobile cloud computing
is. In this paper, we consider it is a novel computing
mode consisting of mobile computing and cloud computing,
which provide cloud based services to users through the
Internet and mobile devices.
On one hand, the mobile cloud computing is a
development of mobile computing, and an extension to
cloud computing. In mobile cloud computing, the previous
mobile device-based intensive computing, data storage and
mass information processing have been transferred
to ’cloud’ and thus the requirements of mobile devices in
computing capability and resources have been reduced, so the
developing, running, deploying and using mode of mobile
applications have been totally changed. On the other hand,
the terminals which people used to access and acquire cloud
services are suitable for mobile devices like smartphone,
PDA, Tablet, and iPad but not restricted to fixed devices
(such as PC), which reflects the advantages and original
intention of cloud computing. Therefore, from both aspects
of mobile computing and cloud computing, the mobile cloud
computing is a combi- nation of the two technologies, a
development of distributed, grid and centralized algorithms,
and have broad prospects for application.
B. Architecture
Fig. 3 Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) Architecture
The general architecture of MCC proposed by [8]
can be shown in Fig.3 [9]. Mobile devices are
connected to the mobile networks via base stations (e.g.,
base transceiver station (BTS), access point, or satellite)
that establish and control the connections (air links) and
functional interfaces between the networks and mobile
devices. Mobile user’s requests and information (e.g., ID
and location) are transmitted to the central processors that
are connected to servers providing mobile network services.
Here, Mobile network operators can provide services to
mobile users as AAA (Authentication, Authorization, and
Accounting) based on the home agent (HA) and
subscriber’s data stored in databases. After that, the
subscriber’s requests are delivered to a cloud through the
Internet. In cloud, the cloud controllers process the
requests to provide mobile users with the
corresponding cloud services. These services are
developed with the concepts of utility computing,
virtualization, and service oriented architecture (eg.web
application, and database servers).
c) Key Requirements for Mobile Cloud Computing
There are some key features of Mobile Cloud Computing

4. Vikas Kottari et al. / IJAIR Vol. 2 Issue 3 ISSN: 2278-7844
© 2013 IJAIR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
490
that make it possible to implement seamless service delivery
in across the network environment. From the perspective of
the enterprise solution provider or web/mobile application
developer, the objectives of the Mobile Cloud Computing
platform are:
1. Simple APIs offering transparent access to
mobile services, and requiring no specific
knowledge of underlying network technologies.
2. The ability to deploy applications across multiple
carrier networks, under a single commercial
agreement.
3. Seamless handling of each carrier’s specific
network policy, such as chosen mobile subscriber
confirmed opt-in / confirmed opt-out and privacy
management principles.
IV.APPLICATIONS
Mobile cloud computing is one of the mobile technology
trends in the future since it combines the advantages of the
integration of both mobile computing and cloud
computing, thereby providing optimal services for mobile
users. The applications supported by mobile cloud computing
including mobile commerce, mobile learning, and mobile
healthcare and other areas.
Mobile cloud applications move the computing power and
data storage away from mobile phones and into the cloud,
bringing apps and mobile computing to not just Smartphone
users but a much broader range of mobile subscribers.
A) Offloading Computation
A new generation of mobile applications in Apple Appstore,
and Google Android Marketplace, etc are pushing the boundary
on how we interact with the physical world and the cyber
world. These days the mobile apps are such that, they require
compute intensive capabilities such as speech recognition,
natural language processing, computer vision and graphics,
machine learning, augmented reality, planning and decision
making. These capabilities run counter to the resource
poverty nature of mobile devices. This constraint is not just a
temporary limitation of current technology, but is intrinsic to
mobility.
On one hand are small form factor handheld devices and on
the other is the cloud, a nearly limitless pool of computing
resources that is being heavily touted as the future of
computing.
B) Processing Speed and Data Storage
Mobile Cloud Computing will help to overcome
limita- tions of mobile devices in particular of the
processing power and data storage.
C) Increased Battery Life
MCC also might help to extend the battery life by
moving the execution of commutation-intensive
application ‘to the cloud’.
D) Improving reliability
Storing data or running applications on clouds is an
effective way to improve the reliability since the data and
application are stored and backed up on a number of
computers. This reduces the chance of data and application
lost on the mobile devices. In addition, MCC can be
designed as a comprehensive data security model for both
service providers and users. For example, the cloud can
be used to protect copyrighted digital contents (e.g., video,
clip, and music) from being abused and unauthorized
distribution [10]. Also, the cloud can remotely provide to
mobile users with security services such as virus scanning,
malicious code detection, and authentication [11]. Also, such
cloud-based security services can make efficient use of the
collected record from different users to improve the
effectiveness of the services.
E) Security
Mobile Cloud Computing can increase security level for
mobile devices achieved by a centralized monitoring and
maintenance of software.
F) Online shopping
MCC can also become a one-stop shopping option for
users of mobile devices since Mobile Cloud Operators can
simultaneously act as virtual network operators, provide e-
payment services, and provide software, data storage, etc. as
a service.
G) A number of new technical functionalities might be
provided by mobile clouds. In particular, provisioning of
context- and location-awareness enables personalization of
services is an attractive functionality.
H) m-Health Care
The purpose of applying MCC in medical applications is
to minimize the limitations of traditional medical treatment
(e.g., small physical storage, security and privacy, and
medical errors [12]). Mobile healthcare (m-healthcare)
provides mobile users with convenient helps to access
resources (e.g., patient health records) easily and quickly.
Besides, m-healthcare offers hospitals and healthcare
organizations a variety of on-demand services on clouds
rather than owning standalone applications on local servers.
I) m-Game
Mobile game (m-game) is a potential market generating
revenues for service providers. M-game can completely
offload game engine requiring large computing resource
(e.g., graphic rendering) to the server in the cloud, and
gamers only interact with the screen interface on their

5. Vikas Kottari et al. / IJAIR Vol. 2 Issue 3 ISSN: 2278-7844
© 2013 IJAIR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
491
devices [13] demonstrates that offloading (multimedia
code) can save energy for mobile devices, thereby
increasing game playing time on mobile devices.
V. CHALLENGES
Cloud Mobile Media (CMM) applications, unlike other bi
cloud applications, will need to overcome the challenges of
the wireless network, including limited bandwidth and
impact on user experience. Moreover, many of the
CMM applications will be very compute and network
bandwidth intensive, and hence will have major
implications on cloud and network costs incurred per user,
and the ability to scale to millions of users as mobile cloud
computing becomes popular. In this section, we discuss in
more details about the challenges.
A) Cloud Service Cost and Scalability
One of the primary advantages of using cloud services is to
eliminate capital expenses, and depend on the elasticity of
cloud computing, and the cloud utility or on-demand pricing
model, to scale to varying capacity needs. However, as we
show in this section, there will be challenges faced by
computing and bandwidth intensive CMM applications like
cloud based mobile gaming, in terms of prohibitively high
operating expenses when using on-demand cloud pricing
models.
B) Mobile Network Cost and Scalability
Besides the potentially high cloud operating expenses, and
cloud scalability concern, CMM applications can have very
high demand on wireless network bandwidth, having
implications on the capacity of the mobile networks, in
particular during peak demand periods, potentially negatively
impacting network latency, packet loss, and response time,
with the consequent negative impact on user experience.
Moreover, the high wireless bandwidth requirement may
prohibitively increase the wireless data bills of mobile users,
making CMM applications impractical.
C) Availability
Service availability becomes more important issue in
MCC than that in the cloud computing with wired networks.
Mobile users may not be able to connect to the cloud to
obtain service due to traffic congestion, network failures, and
the out-of-signal.
D) Heterogeneity
MCC will be used in the highly heterogeneous networks in
terms of wireless network interfaces. Different mobile nodes
access to the cloud through different radio access
technologies such as WCDMA, GPRS, WiMAX,
CDMA2000, and WLAN. As a result, an issue of how to
handle the wireless connectivity while satisfying MCC’s
requirements arises (e.g., always-on connectivity, on-demand
scalability of wireless connectivity, and the energy efficiency
of mobile devices).
E) Issues in Computing offloading
Offloading is one of the main features of MCC to
improve the battery lifetime for the mobile devices and to
increase the performance of applications. However, offloading
is not always the effective way to save energy. For a code
compilation, offloading might consume more energy than
that of local processing when the size of codes is small. For
example, when the size of altered codes after compilation is
500KB, offloading consumes about 5% of a device’s battery
for its communication while the local processing consumes
about 10% of the battery for its computation. In this case,
the offloading can save the battery up to 50%. However,
when the size of altered codes is 250KB, the efficiency
reduces to 30%. When the size of altered codes is small, the
offloading consumes more battery than that of local
processing.
F) Security for Mobile Users
Mobile devices such as cellular phone, PDA, and
smartphone are exposed to numerous security threats like
malicious codes (e.g., virus, worm, and Trojan horses) and
their vulnerability. In addition, with mobile phones integrated
global positioning system (GPS) device, they can cause
privacy issues for subscribers.
VI.CONCLUSION
The concept of cloud computing provides a brand new
opportunity for the development of mobile applications since
it allows the mobile devices to maintain a very thin layer
for user applications and shift the computation and processing
overhead to the virtual environment.
A cloud application needs a constant connection that might
prove to be an Achilles heel for the cloud computing move-
ment. However as mobile internet capabilities continue to get
better, it is likely that solutions to this particular problem
will become apparent. New programming languages such as
HTML 5 already provide a solution by enabling data caching
through a mobile device, and this allows a cloud application
to continue working if connection has been momentarily lost.
Today’s mobile applications are demanding compute
intensive capabilities such as speech recognition, natural
language process- ing, computer vision and graphics, machine
learning, augmented reality, planning and decision making.
These demands will not be met solely by making more
powerful mobile devices.
In this paper, we envision that the new capabilities enable
mobile users to seamlessly utilize the cloud to obtain the
resource benefits without incurring delays and jitter and
without worrying about energy. By thus empowering mobile
users, mobile computing will be able to break free of the

6. Vikas Kottari et al. / IJAIR Vol. 2 Issue 3 ISSN: 2278-7844
© 2013 IJAIR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
492
fundamental constraints that have been keeping us from
transform many areas of human activity. We envision the
future of mobile computing applications will be built on top of
a rich eco-system of basic mobile cloud services.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We are thankful to Mr. Alok Ranjan for supporting us.
REFERENCES
[1] Canalys, “Smart phones overtake client PCs in 2011”,
http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/smart-phones-overtake-
client-pcs-2011 ”, Feb. 2012.
[2] ORLANDO, Fla., October 23, 2012
Gartner Identifies the Top10 Strategic Technologies for 2013
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2209615
[3] Orlando, Fla., October 18, 2011
Gartner Identifies the Top10 Strategic Technologies for 2012
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/1826214
[4] Cloud Computing definition
http://www.techterms.com/definition/cloud_computing
[5] B. Rochwerger, D. Breitgand, E. Levy, A. Galis, K. Nagin, I.
Llorente, R. Montero, Y. Wolfsthal, E. Elmroth, J. Ca´ceres et al.,
“The reservoir model and architecture for open federated cloud
computing,” IBM Journal of Research and Development, vol. 53, no.
4, pp. 1–11, 2009.
[6] B. Marrapese. (2010, Dec.) Google ceo: a few years later,
the mobile phone becomes a super computer. [Online]. Available:
http://www.itnews-blog.com/it/21320.html
[7] http://www.mobilecloudcomputingforum.com
[8] Hong T.Dinh, Chonho Lee, Dusit Niyato, and Ping Wang,” A
Survey of Mobile Cloud
Computing: Architecture, Applications, and Approaches”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.
[9] Mobile Cloud Computing Architecture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mobile_Cloud_Architectur
e.jpg
[10] P. Zou, C. Wang, Z. Liu, and D. Bao, “Phosphor: A Cloud Based
DRM Scheme with Sim Card,” in Proceedings of the 12th
International Asia-Pacific on Web Conference (APWEB), pp. 459,
June 2010.
[11] J. Oberheide, K. Veeraraghavan, E. Cooke, J. Flinn, and F.
Jahanian. “Virtualized in-cloud security services for mobile
devices,” in Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Virtualization in
Mobile Computing (MobiVirt), pp. 31-35, June 2008.
[12] D. Kopec, M. H. Kabir, D. Reinharth, O. Rothschild, and J. A.
Castiglione, “Human Errors in Medical Practice: Systematic
Classification and Reduction with Automated Information
Systems,” Journal of Medical Systems, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 297 - 313,
August 2003.
[14] Z. Li, C. Wang, and R. Xu, “Computation offloading to save
energy on handheld devices: a partition scheme,” in
Proceedings of the 2001 international conference on Compilers,
architecture, and synthesis for embedded systems (CASES), pp.
238 - 246, November 2001
[15] Mobile Cloud Computing Challenges
http://www2.alcatel-lucent.com/techzine/mobile-cloud-
computing-challenges/