MobiCOP: A Scalable and Reliable Mobile Code Offloading Solution

Abstract

Code offloading is a popular technique for extending the natural capabilities of mobile devices by migrating processor-intensive tasks to resource-rich surrogates. Yet despite multiple platforms for offloading being available in academia, these frameworks have yet to permeate the industry. One of the primary reasons for this is limited experimentation in practical settings and lack of reliability, scalability, and options for distribution. This paper introduces MobiCOP, a new code offloading framework designed from the ground up with these requirements in mind. It features a novel design fully self-contained in a library and offers compatibility with most stock Android devices available today. Compared to local task executions, MobiCOP offers performance improvements of up to 17x, increased battery efficiency of up to 25x, shows minimum performance degradation in environments with unstable networks, and features an auto-scaling module that allows its server counterpart to scale to an arbitrary number of offloading requests. It is compatible with the most relevant Android technologies optimized for heavy computation (NDK and Renderscript) and has so far been well received by fellow mobile developers. We hope MobiCOP will help bring mobile code offloading closer to the industry realm.