Offloading for Mobile Device Performance Improvement

Mobile devices are increasingly becoming part of everyday life. These include smart phones, tablets, wearable devices etc. Due to their mobility aspect, they are always constrained in their size and weight, which limits their resource capacity, e.g. processing power, and battery life. One possible solution for augmentation of such resource-constrained devices is through efficient usage of their surrounding resources, i.e. using some offloading technique. This paper studies how offloading of tasks to the surrounding resources affects on both the performance of task execution as well as the battery life of the mobile device. Two mobile phones and two tablets (from two different manufacturers) are studied in the experiments to find out the impact of the device characteristics. Two computationally demanding tasks, namely image processing and encryption/decryption, are used in these experiments. These results are compared to our earlier results on mobile devices of previous generations. We assumed that the increased computing power of new devices would make offloading obsolete. Our results show gains both in energy saving and in computational performance with these mobile devices. The comparison to our earlier results show that the performance increase of newer mobile device generations has not diminished the benefits of offloading. These results are in line with results presented in literature and they show that the offloading could offer a viable approach for resource augmentation of mobile devices towards edge/fog resources emphasized by the new 5G technology

Cloudlet computing : recent advances, taxonomy, and challenges

A cloudlet is an emerging computing paradigm that is designed to meet the requirements and expectations of the Internet of things (IoT) and tackle the conventional limitations of a cloud (e.g., high latency). The idea is to bring computing resources (i.e., storage and processing) to the edge of a network. This article presents a taxonomy of cloudlet applications, outlines cloudlet utilities, and describes recent advances, challenges, and future research directions. Based on the literature, a unique taxonomy of cloudlet applications is designed. Moreover, a cloudlet computation offloading application for augmenting resource-constrained IoT devices, handling compute-intensive tasks, and minimizing the energy consumption of related devices is explored. This study also highlights the viability of cloudlets to support smart systems and applications, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and applications that require high-quality service. Finally, the role of cloudlets in emergency situations, hostile conditions, and in the technological integration of future applications and services is elaborated in detail. © 2013 IEEE

Towards an Efficient Context-Aware System: Problems and Suggestions to Reduce Energy Consumption in Mobile Devices

Looking for optimizing the battery consumption is an open issue, and we think it is feasible if we analyze the battery consumption behavior of a typical context-aware application to reduce context-aware operations at runtime. This analysis is based on different context sensors configurations. Actually existing context-aware approaches are mainly based on collecting and sending context data to external components, without taking into account how expensive are these operations in terms of energy consumption. As a first result of our work in progress, we are proposing a way for reducing the context data publishing. We have designed a testing battery consumption architecture supported by Nokia Energy Profiler tool to verify consumption in different scenarios

Leveraging cloudlets for immersive collaborative applications

To enable immersive applications on mobile devices, the authors propose a component-based cyber foraging framework that optimizes application-specific metrics by not only offloading but also configuring application components at runtime. It also enables collaborative scenarios by sharing components between multiple devices

A tale of three systems : case studies on the application of architectural tactics for cyber-foraging

Cyber-foraging is a technique to enable mobile devices to extend their computing power and storage by offloading computation or data to more powerful servers located in the cloud or in single-hop proximity. In previous work, we developed a set of reusable architectural tactics for cyber-foraging systems. We define architectural tactics as design decisions that influence the achievement of a system quality. In this article we present the results of three case studies to validate the application of the tactics to promote their intended functional and non-functional requirements. The first two case studies focus on the identification of architectural tactics in existing cyber-foraging systems. The third case study focuses on the development of a new cyber-foraging system using the architectural tactics. The results of the case studies are an initial demonstration of the validity of the tactics, and the potential for taking a tactics-driven approach to fulfill functional and non-functional requirements for cyber-foraging systems. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved