Conclusion
Over the past few years, mobile cloud computing has become a very active research topic and has consequently attracted the attention of many researchers. Mobile cloud computing has emerged to overcome the hardware limitations of mobile devices. In this work, we have presented a comprehensive survey of recent (focusing on the last eight years) mobile cloud computing architectures. We compared traditional cloud computing with mobile cloud computing. Furthermore, we compared 26 recent surveys published from 2010 to the present day on mobile cloud computing. Highlighted here were their focus, components of the proposed architecture for mobile cloud computing, the contributions they make, the analysis technique used to determine research challenges for mobile cloud computing and describing these challenges. Moreover, we have proposed a generic architecture to assess 30 recent representative mobile cloud computing research architectures using a set of assessment criteria. In this work, we have presented a holistic view of the current status of mobile cloud computing through a quantitative analysis and benchmark comparison to determine the major research challenges facing mobile cloud computing. Based on the analysis, we identified several research challenges that need further investigation. These challenges include security, privacy and trust, bandwidth and data transfer, data management and synchronization, energy efficiency, and heterogeneity.
