A survey of resource allocation in the mobile cloud computing environment

Abstract

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is the integration of mobile computing and cloud computing. It provides an opportunity for users to obtain cloud resources over the internet. Resource allocation is a complex problem owing to the presence of heterogeneous application workloads in MCC. In recent years, few studies have clearly analysed the research problem and surveyed resource allocation in the MCC environment. Hence, it is very important to provide a comprehensive review of resource allocation to complement existing literature for the MCC environment. In this paper, a survey is made of resource allocation in MCC, and the state-of-the-art of the resource allocation strategies is presented. The issues and the current approaches to solve this problem are discussed in detail. Opportunities and challenges in this field are also examined, and future research directions are presented.