Saving Energy for Cloud Applications in Mobile Devices Using Nearby Resources

In this paper, we present a middleware to save energy in mobile computing devices that offload tasks to a remote server in the cloud. Saving energy in these devices is very important to prolong the battery life and avoid overheating. The middleware uses an available nearby device called auxiliary server either as a surrogate for the remote one, or as a proxy to pass the data between the mobile device and the remote server. The main idea is to reduce the energy consumption of the communication with the remote server by using a high-speed or a low-power local connection with the auxiliary server instead. The paper also analyzes when it is beneficial to use the auxiliary server based on the response time from the remote server and the bandwidth of the remote connection. The proposed middleware is evaluated using different benchmarks, including commonly used applications in mobile devices, and simulations. Furthermore, it is compared to state-of-the art approaches in this area. The experiments show that The middleware is energy-efficient especially when the bandwidth of the remote communication is relatively low or the server is overloaded.