For many cloud users and providers, managing data on the cloud raises many complications. In mobile cloud computing, as the name itself suggests, data that would traditionally be only accessible only to the mobile device’s owner, would now be stored on, accessible to, shared with external devices or users. For many mobile users, this raises privacy and security questions. Also, data representation in mobile devices vary, and in a heterogeneous mobile cloud, this would lead to problems with portability and interoperability. Computations in a mobile cloud would be spread across a distributed file system, where multiple devices may need to access and modify files.
Furthermore, special considerations must be given to accessing files from mobiles over wireless networks. In a mobile cloud, users geographical locations are not fixed, and bandwidth must be conserved because of data access costs. However, it is also vital that mobile databases contain policies to safeguard against data loss while ensuring it conforms to mobility constraints. We discuss these issues in the following subsections. Issues regarding data privacy and security are not discussed here, since they have already been explained at length in Section 4.4: Privacy, Security and Trust.
