A Lightweight Distributed Framework for Computational Offloading in Mobile Cloud Computing

The latest developments in mobile computing technology have enabled intensive applications on the modern Smartphones. However, such applications are still constrained by limitations in processing potentials, storage capacity and battery lifetime of the Smart Mobile Devices (SMDs). Therefore, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) leverages the application processing services of computational clouds for mitigating resources limitations in SMDs. Currently, a number of computational offloading frameworks are proposed for MCC wherein the intensive components of the application are outsourced to computational clouds. Nevertheless, such frameworks focus on runtime partitioning of the application for computational offloading, which is time consuming and resources intensive. The resource constraint nature of SMDs require lightweight procedures for leveraging computational clouds. Therefore, this paper presents a lightweight framework which focuses on minimizing additional resources utilization in computational offloading for MCC. The framework employs features of centralized monitoring, high availability and on demand access services of computational clouds for computational offloading. As a result, the turnaround time and execution cost of the application are reduced. The framework is evaluated by testing prototype application in the real MCC environment. The lightweight nature of the proposed framework is validated by employing computational offloading for the proposed framework and the latest existing frameworks. Analysis shows that by employing the proposed framework for computational offloading, the size of data transmission is reduced by 91%, energy consumption cost is minimized by 81% and turnaround time of the application is decreased by 83.5% as compared to the existing offloading frameworks. Hence, the proposed framework minimizes additional resources utilization and therefore offers lightweight solution for computational offloading in MCC.

移动计算技术的最新进展，使得各类高负载应用得以在现代智能手机上运行。然而，此类应用仍受限于智能移动设备（Smart Mobile Devices, SMDs）的处理能力、存储容量与电池续航短板。为此，移动云计算（Mobile Cloud Computing, MCC）借助计算云的应用处理服务，以缓解智能移动设备的资源瓶颈问题。当前，针对移动云计算已提出多种计算卸载框架，可将应用中的高负载组件外包至计算云环境。但此类框架多聚焦于应用运行时的分区以实现计算卸载，这类操作往往耗时且资源消耗量大。智能移动设备的资源受限特性，亟需轻量化方案来借力计算云服务。为此，本文提出一款轻量化框架，旨在最小化移动云计算场景下计算卸载过程中的额外资源占用。该框架依托计算云的集中式监控、高可用与按需访问服务特性，实现计算卸载。由此可降低应用的周转时间与执行成本。研究通过在真实移动云计算环境中测试原型应用，对该框架进行了性能评估。通过将本框架与当前主流现有框架的计算卸载效果进行对比，验证了所提框架的轻量化特性。分析结果表明，与现有卸载框架相比，采用本框架进行计算卸载时，数据传输量可降低91%，能耗成本降低81%，应用周转时间缩短83.5%。综上，所提框架可有效降低额外资源占用，为移动云计算场景下的计算卸载提供了轻量化解决方案。