Mobile storage augmentation in mobile cloud computing: Taxonomy, approaches, and open issues

Worldwide employment of mobile devices in various critical domains, particularly healthcare, disaster recovery, and education has revolutionized data generation rate. However, rapidly rising data volume intensifies data storage and battery limitations of mobile devices. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) as the state-of-the-art mobile computing aims to augment mobile storage by leveraging infinite cloud resources to provide unlimited storage capabilities with energy-dissipation prevention. Researchers have already surveyed varied MCC aspects and its challenges, but successful futuristic Mobile Storage Augmentation (MSA) approaches demand deep insight into the current storage augmentation solutions that highlights critical challenges, which are lacking. This paper thoroughly investigates the main MSA issues in three domains of mobile computing, cloud computing, and MCC to present a taxonomy. Also, it examines several credible MSA approaches and mechanisms in MCC, classifies characteristics of cloud-based storage resources, and presents open issues that direct future research.