# Software Architecture for Mobile Cloud Computing Systems
## 7 Past and Emerging Trends of Research on Architecting Mobile Cloud Software
### Emerging and Futuristic Trends of Research
To realize such a vision of IoT, a number of challenges exist in terms of engineering efforts, safety, security, and governance of MCC-driven IoT systems [S114; S120], [17]. Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a recent term that was coined by Cisco Systems and is also referred to as fog computing. MEC aims to support the theory that it may be impractical or impossible to always transmit all the data across the whole Internet from mobile devices to the cloud service provider [S96; 518; 519]. In this context, MEC aims at provisioning of the resources like computation and storage infrastructure at the logical edge of the network, i.e., mobile devices connected to the cloud-based servers. Moreover, a geographically distributed platform rather than at centralized spots can better support the MEC architecture. Some of the practical examples of the MEC technology are Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud data centers. In the most recent years, the research on mobile edge clouds has started to emerge [S76; S77; S91; S92; S96]. A recent study [S96] highlights that \"_while the MCC tries to push the limits of mobile applications by including centralized resources to achieve computational offloading, MEC goes further by assigning the major part of remote operations directly to the surrounding infrastructure - an approach that has been successfully applied to improve latencies of edge cloud applications and mitigates the ever-growing bandwidth requirements._\" A recent emergence and progress of research on MEC needs to investigate MCC from the MEC perspective. Software architecture to design MEC systems can help to abstract the system complexities to model, develop, and evolve the system structure and behavior at higher abstraction levels. Software architecture to design MEC systems  
Figure 8: Quality attributes for mobile- and cloud-based systems. can help to abstract the system complexities to model, develop, and evolve the system structure and behavior at higher abstraction levels. **Green and Energy Efficient Computing** refers to the design and operations of computing systems that aim to minimize the carbon footprint and maximize the energy efficiency. The resource poverty of a mobile device and specifically the power consumption has led to the research and development of solutions that enable energy efficiency [S6; S5; S10; S40; S50]. A lot of research has already been carried out; however, a futuristic solution needs to go beyond the fundamental research and to provide real-world solutions that promote the notion of green computing in particular and energy efficiency of mobile-cloud in particular [S78; S83]. **Mobility in Connected Healthcare** is also an area of future interest as highlighted by the results of the mapping study. In a connected healthcare system, mobile devices can continuously monitor the user's health conditions and health logs are maintained at the cloud-based servers. The health logs provide historical and often real-time data relating to a user's health. Moreover, the health logs are made available as portable records with their storage in the cloud and shared with medical experts when required. However, considering the medically critical data, future research is also required to ensure the standardization, security, and privacy-related aspects while generating, consuming, or analyzing the health-specific data [S73; S79].