Offloading Computations to Mobile Devices and Cloudlets via an Upgraded NFC Communication Protocol

The increasing complexity of smartphone applications and services necessitate high battery consumption, but the growth of smartphones' battery capacity is not keeping pace with these increasing power demands. To overcome this problem, researchers gave birth to the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) research area. In this paper, we advance on previous ideas, proposing and implementing a Near Field Communication (NFC)-based computation offloading framework. This research is motivated by the advantages of NFC's short distance communication, its better security, and its low battery consumption characteristics. We design a new NFC communication protocol that overcomes the limitations of the default NFC protocol; removing the need for constant user interaction, the one-way communication restraint, and the limit on low data size transfer. Via the implemented framework, parts of mobile applications can be offloaded to other mobile devices or cloudlets equipped with an NFC reader. We present experimental results of the energy consumption and the time duration of computationally and data intensive representative applications: (i) RSA key generation and encryption, (ii) gaming/puzzles, (iii) face detection, (iv) media download from the Internet, and (v) data transferring between the mobile and the cloudlet. We show that when the helper device is more powerful than the device offloading the computations, the execution time of the tasks is reduced. Finally, we show that devices that offload application parts considerably reduce their energy consumption due to the low-power NFC interface and the benefits of offloading.