Cloud-based computation offloading for mobile devices: State of the art, challenges and opportunities

Mobile cloud computing is a new rapidly growing field. In addition to the conventional fashion that mobile clients access cloud services as in the well-known client/server model, existing work has proposed to explore cloud functionalities in another perspective - offloading part of the mobile codes to the cloud for remote execution in order to optimize the application performance and energy efficiency of the mobile device. In this position paper, we investigate the state of the art of code offloading for mobile devices, highlight the significant challenges towards a more efficient cloud-based offloading framework, and also point out how existing technologies can provide us opportunities to facilitate the framework implementation.