Offloading Approach for Flexible Provisioning and Execution of Remote Data-gathering Applications

Nowadays, applications must be provided for mobile devices with very different resources. In order to provide the user with a satisfying experience, some of the computation can be offloaded to a remote server. This paper presents an approach for this offloading process for remote data-gathering applications. The set of requirements to be fulfilled by the approach is identified and presented. This approach takes into account resources such as CPU, memory, storage and connection bandwidth, both at provisioning and execution time, as well as allowing different granularities for the tasks to be offloaded. In addition, it takes into account other tasks being executed in the mobile device and in the server. The approach is based on client-server architecture. A first-approach solution is presented, describing the decisions to be made both at application-provisioning time and during runtime. A prototype of a.NET application for sputum analysis has been implemented in order to show the applicability of the proposed approach. Execution time, memory usage, storage and transmission time have been tested with a variety of devices. The results show how this approach can be applied in practice, even with the limitations that operating systems and real devices impose.