Rethinking the Mobile Code Offloading Paradigm: From Concept to Practice

Mobile code offloading is a relatively well known proposal for enhancing the capabilities of mobile platforms by migrating resource intensive tasks to resource rich surrogates hosted in the cloud. Yet, most of the research in the area has been focused on theoretical gains achieved through custom OS versions in ideal scenarios. This paper presents MobiCOP, a new code offloading platform that seeks to address the reproducibility issues of other offloading solutions by encapsulating all offloading logic in a library and offering compatibility with major IaaS providers. MobiCOP achieves comparable performance and battery improvements with gains of up to a factor of 11 in both areas. Moreover, MobiCOP has also been tested in scenarios with unreliable connectivity, as is usually the case in actual mobile networks, where it has shown that it still manages to outperform local task executions by a fair margin.

I. Introduction

The massive competition in the mobile computing industry has triggered an unprecedented growth in the capabilities of mobile devices. In response, consumers are becoming ever more demanding in their expectations of modern smartphones, fueling an important amount of innovation in every passing generation. Yet this comes with an important consequence: multi-core processors, high fidelity graphics through high resolution displays and a variety of accompanying sensors have become the norm, a fact that severely affects the battery life of mobile platforms. Indeed, in spite of the significant progress made in battery design and software-based power optimizations, battery remains (and will remain) a first-class design constraint for mobile devices [2].