Dynamic Outsourcing Mobile Computation to the Cloud

Abstract

Mobile devices are becoming the universal interface to online services and cloud computing applications. Since mobile phones have limited computing power and battery life, there is a potential to migrate computation intensive application components to external computing resources. The Cloud is an attractive platform for offloading due to elastic resource provisioning and the ability to support large scale service deployment. In this paper,we discuss the potential for offloading mobile computation for different computation patterns and analyze their tradeoffs. Experiments show that the we can achieve a 27 fold speedup for an image manipulation application and 1.47 fold speedup for a face recognition application. In addition, this outsourcing model can also result in power saving depending on the computation pattern, offloading configuration, and execution environment.