Partial mobile application offloading to the cloud for energy-efficiency with security measures

Abstract

Mobile applications are becoming computationally intensive nowadays due to the increasing convenience, reliance on, and sophistication of smartphones. Nevertheless, battery lifetime remains a major obstacle that prohibits the large-scale adoption of such apps. Mobile cloud computing is a promising solution whereby apps are partially processed in the cloud to minimize the overall energy consumption of smartphones. However, this will not necessarily save energy if there is no systematic mechanism to evaluate the effect of offloading an app onto the cloud. In this paper, we present a mathematical model that represents this energy consumption optimization problem. We propose an algorithm to dynamically solve the problem while taking security measures into account. We also propose the free sequence protocol (FSP) that allows for the dynamic execution of apps according to their call graph. Our experimental setup consists of an Android smartphone and a Java server in the cloud. The results demonstrate that our approach saves battery lifetime and enhances performance. They also show the effects of workload amount, network type, computation cost, security operations, signal strength, and call graph structure on the optimized overall energy consumption. © 2015 Published by Elsevier Inc.