Efficient Mobile Computation Using the Cloud

Abstract

Mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power and bandwidth. Cloud computing offers a way to reduce the power consumption of mobile devices by offloading computation to the cloud. However, offloading computation means an increase in communication energy consumption. The trade-off between energy and network characteristics (bandwidth/latency) in a mobile device is very important. Therefore computation offloading must be done strategically. The optimum utilization of the available mobile device resources needs to be assured. In this paper, we propose an intelligent and dynamic algorithm to offload computation to the cloud. We focus on offloading computation based upon the communication topology, device energy and user inputs. We analyze the cost of offloading computation for different user inputs. Based on the inputs, we decide whether to offload the application to the cloud or not. We have simulated our algorithm in MATLAB®, and compared our result to previous approaches. We have found out that our algorithm saves more time, compared to a previous approach, and also reduces device energy usage by moving energy hungry processes to the cloud.