Developing offloading-enabled application development frameworks for android mobile devices

Mobile devices, such as smartphones, offer people great convenience in accessing information and computation resources. However, mobile devices remain relatively limited in terms of computing, memory and energy capacity when compared with desktop machines. A promising solution to mitigate these limitations is to enhance the services mobile devices can provide by utilizing powerful cloud platforms through offloading mechanisms, i.e., offloading the heavy information processing tasks from mobile devices to the Cloud. This paper addresses this issue by developing two offloading-enabled application development frameworks by adapting certain Android OS interfaces. The applications developed using these frameworks will be equipped with offloading capability. In the first framework, each application is selfish and makes offloading decisions independently, whereas in the second, a central offloading manager resides in the mobile device and is responsible for making the offloading decisions for all applications. The two frameworks are designed in a way that application developers only need to make minimal changes to their programming behavior. Experiments have been conducted that verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the offloading mechanisms that are proposed