Computation Offloading from Mobile Devices: Can Edge Devices Perform Better Than the Cloud?

Mobile devices like smartphones can augment their low-power processors by offloading portions of mobile applications to cloud servers. However, offloading to cloud data centers has a high network latency. To mitigate the problem of network latency, recently offloading to computing resources lying within the user's premises, such as network routers, tablets or laptop has been proposed. In this paper, we determine the devices whose processors have sufficient power to act as servers for computation offloading. We perform trace-driven simulation of SPECjvm2008 benchmarks to study the performance using different hardware. Our simulation shows that offloading to current state-of-the-art processors of user devices can improve performance of mobile applications. We find that offloading to user's own laptop reduces finish time of benchmark applications by 10%, compared to offloading to a commercial cloud server.