Computational Offloading or Data Binding? Bridging the Cloud Infrastructure to the Proximity of the Mobile User

Mobile and cloud computing are converging as the prominent technologies that are leading the change to the post personal computing (PC) era. Computational offloading and data binding are the core techniques that foster to elastically augment the capabilities of low-power devices, such as smartphones. Mobile applications may be bonded to cloud resources by following a task delegation or code offloading criteria. In a delegation model, a handset can utilize the cloud in a service-oriented manner to delegate asynchronously a resource-intensive mobile task by direct invocation of the service. In contrast, in an offloading model, a mobile application is partitioned and analyzed so that the most computational expensive operations at code level can be identified and offloaded to a remote cloud-based surrogate. We compared in this paper, the mobile cloud computing models for offloading and delegation. We utilized our own frameworks for computational offloading and data binding in the analysis. While in principle, offloading and delegation are viable methods to augment the capabilities of the mobile devices with cloud power, they enrich the mobile applications from different perspectives at diverse computational scales.