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The distant data centre-centric Internet of Things (IoT) systems face the latency issue especially in the real-time-based applications, such as augmented reality, traffic analytics and ambient assisted living. Recently, Fog computing models have been introduced to overcome the latency issue by using the proximity-based computational resources, such as the computers co-located with the cellular base station, grid router devices or computers in local business. However, the increasing users of Fog computing servers cause bottleneck issues and consequently the latency issue arises again. This paper aims to introduce the utilisation of Mist computing (Mist) model, which exploits the computational and networking resources from the devices at the very edge of the IoT networks.

This paper proposes a service-oriented mobile-embedded Platform as a Service (mePaaS) framework that allows the mobile device to provide a flexible platform for proximal users to offload their computational or networking program to mePaaS-based Mist computing node.

The prototype has been tested and performance has been evaluated on the real-world devices. The evaluation results have shown the promising nature of mePaaS.

The proposed framework supports resource-aware autonomous service configuration that can manage the availability of the functions provided by the Mist node based on the dynamically changing hardware resource availability. In addition, the framework also supports task distribution among a group of Mist nodes.

Web services are going mobile. A mobile enterprise can be established in a cellular network by participating mobile hosts, which act as web service providers, and their clients. Mobile hosts enable seamless integration of user‐specific services to the enterprise, by following web service standards, also on the radio link and via resource constrained smart phones. However, establishing such a mobile enterprise poses several technical challenges, such as the quality of service (QoS), discovery aspects and proper integration solutions, for the network as well as for the mobile phone users. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the challenges and research associated with this domain and with establishing the mobile enterprise.

The paper summarizes the challenges and research in the mobile web services domain, along with a detailed discussion of the developed mobile web service mediation framework (MWSMF). MWSMF is realized based on the enterprise service bus (ESB) technology, as an intermediary between mobile hosts and web service clients. Moreover, to scale the mobile enterprise to the loads possible in cellular networks, some of the components of MWSMF are shifted to the new utility computing paradigm, cloud computing.

From the study it was found that ESB provides a good integration solution for the mobile enterprise research challenges. The detailed analysis of the MWSMF concludes that the mediation framework and its components are horizontally scalable, thus allowing to utilize elasticity of cloud platform to meet load requirements of mobile enterprise in an easy and quick manner.

The study addresses the research with providing services from smart phones and establishing mobile enterprise. The QoS challenges are addressed and the study introduces an integration framework using ESB technology. The porting of MWSMF onto the cloud is also addressed. As an added value, the research serves as a case study for porting enterprise applications to the cloud.

Cloud computing becomes mobile when a mobile device tries to access the shared pool of computing resources provided by the cloud, on demand. Mobile applications may enrich their functionality by delegating heavy tasks to the clouds as the remote processing and storage have become possible by adding asynchronous behavior in the communication. However, developing mobile cloud applications involves working with services and APIs from different cloud vendors, which mostly are not interoperable across clouds. Moreover, by adding asynchronicity, mobile applications must rely on push mechanisms which are considered to be moderately reliable, and thus not recommended in scenarios that require high scalability and quality of service (QoS). To counter these problems, and the purpose of this paper, is to design a middleware framework, Mobile Cloud Middleware (MCM), which handles the interoperability issues and eases the use of process‐intensive services from smartphones by extending the concept of mobile host.

MCM is developed as an intermediary between the mobile and the cloud, which hides the complexity of dealing with multiple cloud services from mobiles. Several applications are presented to show the benefits of mobiles going cloud‐aware. Moreover, to verify the scalability of MCM, load tests are performed on the hybrid cloud resources using well known load balancing mechanisms like HAProxy and Tsung.

From the study it was found that it is possible to handle hybrid cloud services from mobiles by using MCM. The analysis demonstrated that the MCM shows reasonable performance levels of interaction with the user, thus validating the proof of concept. Moreover, MCM decreases the effort in developing mobile cloud applications and helps in keeping soft‐real time responses by using its asynchronous approach.

MCM fosters the utilization of different types of cloud services rather than the traditional mobile cloud services based on data synchronization. By offloading heavy tasks to the clouds, the framework extends the processing power and storage space capabilities of the constrained smart phones. The applications mentioned in the paper bring an added value by being success stories for mobile cloud computing domain in general.

Recent smart mobile devices are capable of letting users produce various digital content, and share/upload the content to many social network services (SNS) directly via wireless network connections. The phenomenon has increased the number of people using mobile SNS applications. Although the applications have become more popular, mobile users have been restricted in the virtual communities of online SNS and are not aware of the social opportunities available to them in real-time surrounding. While they spend most of their time accessing online SNS, they have missed many opportunities to interact with others for new friendships, business opportunities or information sharing. Consequently, a new breed of mobile social network (MSN) system has arisen to assist mobile users to interact with proximal people and perform various social activities. Such a proximal-based MSN environment is termed a Mobile Social Network in Proximity (MSNP).

Developing an MSNP system needs to address a number of issues and challenges, such as heterogeneity, content/service discovery, privacy and trust, resource management, and so on. This paper identifies and describes these challenges, and reviews a number of related solutions from existing literature. In the follow up, this paper addresses a number of open challenges in the MSNP domain.

Although various works have been proposed to enable and overcome challenges in MSNP, there are still many unsolved open challenges in terms of identification, content management, social-aware discovery, trust in public environment, adaptation, quality of service and the development of MSNP. We have addressed these challenges in this paper as future research directions in the MSNP domain.

This paper provides an original literature review in MSNP and identifies a number of open challenges as research direction in the MSNP domain.