Outsourcing Resource-Intensive Tasks from Mobile Apps to Clouds: Android and Aneka Integration

Mobile Cloud Computing enables augmenting mobile device capabilities and increasing battery lifetime through the extension of cloud services and resources, resulting in an enhanced user experience. However, the development of a mobile cloud application is challenging because it involves dealing with different cloud providers and mobile platforms. To tackle the above issues, a mobile cloud architecture is proposed to asynchronously delegate resource-intensive mobile tasks in order to alleviate the mobile device load and, consequently, extend the battery life. We demonstrate this capability by developing an interface that supports the delegation of heavy tasks from mobile apps running under the Android mobile platform to a cloud computing environment managed by the Aneka Cloud Application Platform. The Aneka Mobile Client Library encapsulates the processes of communicating to cloud is provided, thus, the effort and complexity of developing a mobile cloud application is decreased. Two different resource-intensive mobile application are presented in order to show the library effectiveness. A performance evaluation is conducted showing the feasibility of architecture through the reduction of application execution time and extension of mobile device battery life.