© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The applications and services of Information and Communication Technologies are becoming a very essential part of our daily life. In addition, the spread of advanced technologies including the cloud and mobile cloud computing (MCC), wireless communication, and smart devices made it easy to access the internet and utilize unlimited number of services. For example, we use mobile applications to carry out critical tasks in hospitals, education, finance, and many others. This wide useful usage makes the smart devices an essential component of our daily life. The limited processing capacity and battery lifetime of mobile devices are considered main challenges. This challenge is increased when executing intensive applications. The MCC is believed to overcome these limitations. There are many models in MCC and one efficient model is the cloudlet-based computing. In this model, the mobile devices users communicate with the cloudlets using cheaper efficient technologies, and offload the job requests to be executed on the cloudlet rather than on the enterprise cloud or on the device itself. In this article, we investigated the cloudlet-based MCC architecture, and more specifically, the cooperative cloudlets model. In this model, the applications that require intensive computations such as image processing are offloaded from the mobile device to the nearest cloudlet. If the task cannot be accomplished at this cloudlet, the cloudlets cooperate with each other to accomplish the user request and send the results back to the user. To demonstrate the efficiency of this cooperative cloudlet-based MCC model, we conducted real experiments that execute selected applications such as: object code recognition, and array sorting to measure the delay and power consumption of the cloudlet-based system. Moreover, suitable cloud/mobile cloud simulators such as CloudSim and MCCSim will be used to perform simulation experiments and obtain time and power results.