Nowadays, the mobile cloud synergy has uncovered the horizon to the creation of new systems that implement code offloading to sustain power hungry applications. While the approach has been widely encouraged to save energy and increase responsiveness of the smartphones. The need to offload or not to cloud is questionable, as many are the problems that prevent the use of code offloading in practice.By developing a deep understanding about the core functionality and components of an offloading system, we highlight the drawbacks and introduce the solutions to counter them. We developed a code offloading framework based on annotations to evaluate our ideas. The results demonstrate insights about how the offloading process can be exploited beyond its core principles.

1. Mobile Code Offloading from Concept to
Practice, and Beyond
Huber Flores
huber@ut.ee
HKUST, Hong Kong, 2014

2. Outline
• Background (Concept)
• Problem statement (Practice)
• Solutions (Beyond)
• Conclusions
huber@ut.ee

3. Background
• What is code offloading?
– Type of binding between mobile and cloud
– Move a computational task from one place to
another
• What is the purpose?
– What, when, where, how?
– Release the smartphone from intensive processing
– Increase performance of the mobile apps, in terms
of responsiveness
huber@ut.ee

4. Background
• Code offloading frameworks
– Method
– Thread
– Class
huber@ut.ee

5. Background
• Which are the components of a code
offloading architecture?
– Mobile
• Code profiler
• System profilers
• Decision engine
– Cloud-based surrogate
• Server
huber@ut.ee

6. Background
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7. What is the problem?
huber@ut.ee

8. Problem statement
• Code offloading outcome is mostly negative
– Partial answer to what, when, where, and how
huber@ut.ee

9. Problem statement
• Inaccurate code profiling
• Low effectiveness to detect resource intensive
code
huber@ut.ee

10. Problem statement
• Scalability of the system
huber@ut.ee

11. Problem statement
• Dynamic configuration
Cloud ecosystem
huber@ut.ee

12. Problem statement
• Integration complexity
– Code annotations
– Introduce the mechanisms within the mobile
platform
huber@ut.ee

13. Can code offloading be utilized in
practice to sustain power-hungry
applications?
huber@ut.ee

14. Solutions
• Massive data analysis with cloud
• Mobile crowdsourcing (implicit)
• Exploitation of the cloud surrogate
huber@ut.ee

15. Evidence-aware Mobile Code Offloading
huber@ut.ee

16. Evidence-aware Mobile Code Offloading
• Characterization of the offloading process
huber@ut.ee

17. Evidence-aware Mobile Code Offloading
huber@ut.ee

18. Evidence-aware Mobile Code Offloading
huber@ut.ee

19. Conclusions and future directions
• The characterization of the offloading process
can enhance the outcome of code invocation.
• Increasing the acceleration of the offloading
process is the next reasonable step to
overcome a negative impact.
• Offloading systems powered by SOA
– Energy as a service?
huber@ut.ee

20. THANK YOU FOR LISTENING…
huber@ut.ee