A novel energy efficient platform based model to enable mobile Cloud applications

Due to the nature of communication, mobility and portability in Mobile Computing, the handling of limited computing, storage and network capabilities become increasingly important especially when more features and richer functionality are required today. Cloud Computing, as an elastic computing utility provisioning framework, is shown to be a promising approach, addressing the concerns in Mobile Computing. Many achievements have been made by researchers regarding how to offload computational tasks from mobile systems to the Cloud. However, the proposed offloading methodologies are mainly from the perspectives of mobile application level, focusing on static estimation, dynamic partitioning, cloning, transmission overhead evaluation and migration. Issues related to multi-core Cloud systems are not fully considered, such as overall energy consumption of Cloud systems, information security, usability and availability. In this paper, a platform-based system model is designed from the view of the Cloud platform, trying to enable these Cloud benefits in addition to offloading, and to provide better execution efficiency and overall energy reduction by utilizing the proposed platform level scheduling. Based on the experiments, the proposed platform scheduling can achieve greater energy reduction with little computing overhead on the management node, compared to application-level scheduling methods.