Mobile Cloud Computing: A Review on Smartphone Augmentation Approaches

TL;DR

This paper reviews smartphone augmentation methods, classifying them into hardware and software approaches, emphasizing cloud-based task offloading as a key strategy for resource enhancement in mobile computing.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive taxonomy of augmentation techniques and highlights the effectiveness of resource conservation via task offloading for existing applications.

Findings

Task offloading is more suitable for existing applications due to re-development costs.

Cloud computing plays a significant role in augmenting smartphone capabilities.

A detailed taxonomy and sample execution model are presented for mobile augmentation approaches.

Abstract

Smartphones have recently gained significant popularity in heavy mobile processing while users are increasing their expectations toward rich computing experience. However, resource limitations and current mobile computing advancements hinder this vision. Therefore, resource-intensive application execution remains a challenging task in mobile computing that necessitates device augmentation. In this article, smartphone augmentation approaches are reviewed and classified in two main groups, namely hardware and software. Generating high-end hardware is a subset of hardware augmentation approaches, whereas conserving local resource and reducing resource requirements approaches are grouped under software augmentation methods. Our study advocates that consreving smartphones' native resources, which is mainly done via task offloading, is more appropriate for already-developed applications than new ones, due to costly re-development process. Cloud computing has recently obtained momentous ground as one of the major cornerstone technologies in augmenting smartphones. We present sample execution model for intensive mobile applications and devised taxonomy of augmentation approaches. For better comprehension, the results of this study are summarized in a table.