AXaaS (Acceleration as a service): Can the Telecom Service Provider rent a cloudlet?

As the capabilities of smartphones expand, so do consumers' expectations for resource-intensive mobile applications. However, mobile devices are ill-suited to execute most these applications due to their hardware limitations. Computational offloading offers a way to augment mobile computation power, but it introduces a communication latency, potentially weakening or negating its advantages. To meet the user demand for high performance, we propose a new service architecture called Acceleration as a Service (AXaaS). We formulate AXaaS based on the observation that most resource-intensive applications, such as real-time face-recognition and augmented reality, have similar resource-demand characteristics: a vast majority of the program execution time is spent on a limited set of library calls, such as Generalized Matrix-Multiply operations (GEMM), or FFT. Our AXaaS model suggests accelerating only these operations by the Telecom Service Providers (TSP). We envision the TSP offering this service through a monthly computational service charge, much like their existing monthly bandwidth charge. We demonstrate the technological and business feasibility of AXaaS on a proof-of-concept real-time face recognition application.