Recent Advances and Challenges in Mobile Big Data

The unabated flurry of research activities dedicated to gaining business insights from a flood of data generated by heterogeneous mobile sources, such as the Internet of Vehicles, sensors, and smartphones, has instigated a new research domain called MBD. At the core of this mobile environment, scalability, cost effectiveness, reliability, analytics, and security are important concerns. Coping with these issues in handling MBD requires understanding the challenges associated with it. Mobile computing and big data have been widely studied separately; however, very few studies have explored the convergence of these two domains. In this article, we critically review recent research efforts directed at MBD. We also classify the MBD by devising a thematic taxonomy that is based on source, analytics, applications, characteristics, security, and data type. Furthermore, we discuss the opportunities offered by MBD in terms of analytics. Some potential uses of MBD in healthcare, telecommunication, digital advertising, and transportation are also presented. Several open research challenges are discussed as future research directions.