Application Offloading Based on R-OSGi in Mobile Cloud Computing

In this paper, we proposed and implemented an offloading mechanism for mobile applications based on the R-OSGi framework which supports the Java modular component dynamic services. A mobile application is composed of a number of modules that are eligible for offloading to be executed at a remote server on the Internet and executed at a mobile device. We focused on the problem of how to transfer some modules of a mobile application to the server so as to minimize the total execution time of the whole mobile application. We used a directed tree graph to represent the relationship between the modules of a mobile application. Then, we formulated the offloading problem as a combinatorial optimization problem and proposed two algorithms to solve the offloading problem for a simple-chain application and also for a general application. The proposed algorithms were implemented and examined on the R-OSGi-based framework and the results show that the proposed algorithms are much more efficient than both the cases where no offloading is considered and where all the modules are offloaded to the server.