Framework for Computation Offloading in Mobile Cloud Computing

— The inherently limited processing power and battery lifetime of mobile phones hinder the possible execution of computationally intensive applications like content-based video analysis or 3D modeling. Offloading of computationally intensive application parts from the mobile platform into a remote cloud infrastructure or nearby idle computers addresses this problem. This paper presents our Mobile Augmentation Cloud Services (MACS) middleware which enables adaptive extension of Android application execution from a mobile client into the cloud. Applications are developed by using the standard Android development pattern. The middleware does the heavy lifting of adaptive application partitioning, resource monitoring and computation offloading. These elastic mobile applications can run as usual mobile application, but they can also use remote computing resources transparently. Two prototype applications using the MACS middleware demonstrate the benefits of the approach. The evaluation shows that applications, which involve costly computations, can benefit from offloading with around 95% energy savings and significant performance gains compared to local execution only. IV. INTRODUCTION ESOURCE-DEMANDING multimedia applications such as 3D video games are being increasingly demanded on smart phones. Even if mobile hardware and mobile networks continue to evolve and to improve, mobile devices will always be resource-poor, less secure, with unstable connectivity, and with constrained energy. Resource poverty is major obstacle for many applications [14]. Therefore, computation on mobile devices will always involve a compromise. For example, on-the-fly editing of video clips on a mobile phone is prohibited by the energy and time consumption. Same performance and functionalities on mobile devices still cannot be obtained as on desktop PCs or even notebooks when dealing with high resource-demanding tasks. Recently, the combination of cloud computing [11], wireless communication infrastructure, ubiquitous computing devices, location-based services, and mobile Web, has laid the foundation for a novel computing model, called mobile cloud computing [9]. It provides to users an online access to unlimited computing power and storage space. The cloud abstracts the complexities of provisioning computation and storage infrastructure. The end user uses them as utility and in reality they can be faraway data center or nearby idle hardware. Offloading has gained big attention in mobile cloud computing research, because it has similar aims as the emerging cloud computing paradigm, i.e. to surmount mobile devices' shortcomings by augmenting their capabilities with external resources. Offloading or augmented execution refers to a technique used to overcome the limitations of mobile phones in terms of computation, memory and battery. Such …