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Investigation on runtime partitioning of elastic mobile applications for mobile cloud computing

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Abstract

The latest developments in mobile computing technology have increased the computing capabilities of smartphones in terms of storage capacity, features support such as multimodal connectivity, and support for customized user applications. Mobile devices are, however, still intrinsically limited by low bandwidth, computing power, and battery lifetime. Therefore, the computing power of computational clouds is tapped on demand basis for mitigating resources limitations in mobile devices. Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is believed to be able to leverage cloud application processing services for alleviating the computing limitations of smartphones. In MCC, application offloading is implemented as a significant software level solution for sharing the application processing load of smartphones. The challenging aspect of application offloading frameworks is the resources intensive mechanism of runtime profiling and partitioning of elastic mobile applications, which involves additional computing resources utilization on Smart Mobile Devices (SMDs). This paper investigates the overhead of runtime application partitioning on SMD by analyzing additional resources utilization on SMD in the mechanism of runtime application profiling and partitioning. We evaluate the mechanism of runtime application partitioning on SMDs in the SmartSim simulation environment and validate the overhead of runtime application profiling by running prototype application in the real mobile computing environment. Empirical results indicate that additional computing resources are utilized in runtime application profiling and partitioning. Hence, lightweight alternatives with optimal distributed deployment and management mechanism are mandatory for accessing application processing services of computational clouds.

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Acknowledgements

This work is part of the Mobile Cloud Computing research project at the Mobile Cloud Computing Research Lab at the Department of Computer Systems and Technology, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Malaysia. The project is funded by the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education under the University of Malaya High Impact Research Grant with reference UM.C/HIR/MOHE/FCSIT/03.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mobile Cloud Computing Research Lab, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    Muhammad Shiraz, Ejaz Ahmed, Abdullah Gani & Qi Han

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  1. Muhammad Shiraz
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  2. Ejaz Ahmed
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  4. Qi Han
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Correspondence to Muhammad Shiraz.

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Shiraz, M., Ahmed, E., Gani, A. et al. Investigation on runtime partitioning of elastic mobile applications for mobile cloud computing. J Supercomput 67, 84–103 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-013-0988-6

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