ECOS: Leveraging Software-Defined Networks to support mobile application offloading

Offloading has emerged as a promising idea to allow resource-constrained mobile devices to access intensive applications, without performance or energy costs, by leveraging external computing resources. This could be particularly useful in enterprise contexts where running line-of-business applications on mobile devices can enhance enterprise operations. However, we must address three practical roadblocks to make offloading amenable to adoption by enterprises: (i) ensuring privacy and trustworthiness of offload, (ii) decoupling offloading systems from their reliance on the availability of dedicated resources and (iii) accommodating offload at scale. We present the design and implementation of ECOS, an enterprise-centric offloading framework that leverages Software-Defined Networking to augment prior offloading proposals and address these limitations. ECOS functions as an application running at an enterprise-wide controller to allocate resources to mobile applications based on privacy and performance requirements, to ensure fairness, and to enforce security constraints. Experiments using a prototype based on Android and OpenFlow establish the effectiveness of our approach.