A review on interworking and mobility techniques for seamless connectivity in mobile cloud computing

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) leverages computational clouds for mitigating resources limitations in mobile devices. However, the mobility attribute of mobile devices and the intrinsic limitations of wireless access medium obstruct to achieve the goal of seamless connectivity for accessing distributed services in MCC. Mobility involves the issues of handover, service quality degradation and disruption, whereas the intrinsic limitations of the wireless access medium includes the issues of connectivity fluctuation and heterogeneity of wireless data networks. Therefore, interworking between heterogeneous wireless data networks and mobility management are employed to achieve consistency and seamless connectivity for accessing distributed services in MCC. However, such techniques lack of managing packet loss, handover latency, signaling overhead, service degradation and disruption, guaranteed QoS, and connectivity failure. Therefore, providing seamless connectivity in the network intensive computing environment of mobile cloud computing is a challenging research perspective. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art for interworking and mobility techniques to highlight issues and challenges in transparently leveraging the services of computational clouds for mobile devices. It proposes thematic taxonomy for the classification of the interworking and mobility techniques and qualitatively analyzes the implications and critical aspects of such techniques. The similarities and differences of interworking and mobility techniques are presented on the basis of latency, packet loss, mobility approach, signaling overhead and architecture. Furthermore, we identify the open issues and challenges in seamless connectivity that remains to be addressed.