AgileRabbit: A Feedback-Driven Offloading Middleware for Smartwatch Apps

Abstract

With the rapid development of wearable devices such as smartwatches, we are brought to a new era of wearable computing. Due to limited computational capability, storage, and battery capacity, wearable devices can hardly execute computation-intensive tasks. The mainstream approach to overcoming these limitations is computation offloading, i.e., offloading the tasks to mobile devices or the remote cloud servers. However, computation offloading cannot improve performance or save power consumption under all conditions. For example, offloading may not be worth in the case of very poor network conditions. To address the issue, in this paper, we propose AgileRabbit, a feedback-driven middleware of computation offloading for smartwatch apps. We design an offloading decision algorithm using the feedback data with a given objective i.e., minimizing the task completion time, or minimizing the total power consumption of smartwatches and mobile devices. With the assistance of AgileRabbit, computation-intensive tasks in smartwatch apps can be well scheduled and assigned to the proper computation node. We implement a speech recognition application on Android Wear platform and deploy it on AgileRabbit to validate the effectiveness of our approach. Evaluation results show that AgileRabbit can significantly improve the performance and save power consumption while incurring small overheads.