Resource Scheduling in Mobile Cloud Computing: Taxonomy and Open Challenges

Abstract

Resource scheduling approaches (RSA) are the core component of mobile cloud computing (MCC) systems that aim to optimally allocate cloud-based remote resources to resource-intensive components of mobile applications. The ultimate goal of RSA is to reduce execution time and energy consumption of resource-intensive mobile applications which contributes to successful MCC adoption. Role of RSA is critical in efficiently executing resource-intensive mobile applications in the cloud. Although several aspects of MCC have been extensively reviewed, analysis of RSAs in MCC is overlooked. Therefore, it is important to provide a comprehensive review of RSA to complement existing literature in MCC. In this paper, we conduct a survey to review the state-of-the-art RSA approaches in MCC and present the taxonomy of existing RSA approaches. We present a brief tutorial on resource scheduling in MCC followed by a critical review of some of the most credible approaches to highlight their advantages and disadvantages. We then discuss the open challenges in this area and point out future research directions.