AppMobiCloud: improving mobile web applications by mobile-cloud convergence

Abstract

Benefitting from advanced web technologies like JavaScript, CSS3 and HTML5, current web applications can provide ever richer functionalities and user experiences, on both PC and mobile devices like tablet computers and smartphones. Furthermore, they can perform complex computations which are usually resource-intensive and consuming, e.g., data analytic application and augmented reality games. Mobile devices might suffer from their limited computing capabilities and resources. As mobile devices now are gaining access through excellent connectivity with much more powerful cloud-side services, and offloading can be a potential solution. This paper presents the design and implementation of the AppMobiCloud system for improving mobile web applications by leveraging the mobile-cloud convergence. At development time, AppMobiCloud employs a combination of profiling and points-to analysis. This facilitates application developers to find the computation-intensive code fragments, and specifies whether they can be offloaded with some constraints. At runtime, AppMobiCloud migrates the chosen JavaScript code fragments from the mobile devices for remote execution. It synchronizes client-side application runtime context and constructs the "cloned" context at server, executing the codes there and re-integrating the result back to the mobile device. We evaluate our approach on three well-known JavaScript benchmarks, Dromaeo, V8 and Kraken, and a typical computation-intensive AI game. The evaluation demonstrates that our work can reduce JavaScript application's execution time and energy consumption respectively on mobile devices up to 98% and 83%.