Together with an explosive growth of the mobile applications and emerging of cloud computing concept, mobile cloud computing (MCC) has been introduced to be a potential technology for mobile services. MCC integrates the cloud computing into the mobile environment and overcomes obstacles related to the performance (e.g., battery life, storage, and bandwidth), environment (e.g., heterogeneity, scalability, and availability), and security (e.g., reliability and privacy) discussed in mobile computing. This paper gives a survey of MCC, which helps general readers have an overview of the .MCC including the definition, architecture, and applications. The issues, existing solutions, and approaches are presented. In addition, the future research directions of MCC are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd