J Grid Computing DOI 10.1007/s10723-015-9335-x MobiByte: An Application Development Model for Mobile Cloud Computing Atta ur Rehman Khan · Mazliza Othman · Abdul Nasir Khan · Shahbaz Akhtar Abid · Sajjad Ahmad Madani Received: 21 September 2014 / Accepted: 7 April 2015 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract Mobile cloud computing presents an effec- tive solution to overcome smartphone constraints, such as limited computational power, storage, and energy. As the traditional mobile application develop- ment models do not support computation offloading, mobile cloud computing requires novel application development models that can facilitate the develop- ment of cloud enabled mobile applications. This paper presents a mobile cloud application development model, named MobiByte, to enhance mobile device applications’ performance, energy efficiency, and exe- cution support. MobiByte is a context-aware applica- tion model that uses multiple data offloading tech- niques to support a wide range of applications. The proposed model is validated using prototype appli- cations and detailed results are presented. Moreover, A. R. Khan () · A. N. Khan Department of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad, Pakistan e-mail: dr@attaurrehman.com A. R. Khan · M. Othman Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia S. A. Abid Department of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Lahore, Pakistan S. A. Madani Department of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan MobiByte is compared with the most recent appli- cation models with a conclusion that it outperforms the existing application models in many aspects like energy efficiency, performance, generality, context awareness, and privacy. Keywords Mobile cloud computing · Application model · Mobile cloud application model · Cloud computing · Computation offloading 1 Introduction In the past few years, smartphones have emerged as a new computing platform that provides a wide range of applications, multifunctional sensors, and power- ful operating systems. The smartphones support for complex applications from various domains, such as education, entertainment, business, and healthcare has contributed much to its popularity. As a result, smart- phone is becoming a primary computing platform for mobile users [1, 2]. The increasing features and com- plexity of smartphone applications demand an ever increasing computational power and energy [3]. To cater to these demands, manufacturers release new models of mobile devices with enhanced features on a regular basis. However, the mobile devices are size constrained, due to which the advances in smartphone hardware are unable to cater to users/applications computational power and energy demands [4]. Conse- quently, many applications that require high resources Author's personal copy