Code offload with least context migration in the mobile cloud

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is of particular importance to address the contradiction between the increasing complexity of user applications and the limited lifespan of mobile device's battery, by offloading the computational workloads from local devices to the remote cloud. Current offloading schemes either require the programmer's annotations, which restricts its wide application; or transmits too much unnecessary data, resulting bandwidth and energy waste. In this paper, we propose a novel method-level offloading methodology to offload local computational workload with as least data transmission as possible. Our basic idea is to identify the contexts which are necessary to the method execution by parsing application binaries in advance and applying this parsing result to selectively migrate heap data while allowing successful method execution remotely. Our implementation of this design is built upon Dalvik Virtual Machine. Our experiments and evaluation against applications downloaded from Google Play show that our approach can save data transmission significantly comparing to existing schemes.