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A lightweight active service migration framework for computational offloading in mobile cloud computing

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Abstract

Cloud computing enables access to the widespread services and resources in cloud datacenters for mitigating resource limitations in low-potential client devices. Computational cloud is an attractive platform for computational offloading due to the attributes of scalability and availability of resources. Therefore, mobile cloud computing (MCC) leverages the application processing services of computational clouds for enabling computational-intensive and ubiquitous mobile applications on smart mobile devices (SMDs). Computational offloading frameworks focus on offloading intensive mobile applications at different granularity levels which involve resource-intensive mechanism of application profiling and partitioning at runtime. As a result, the energy consumption cost (ECC) and turnaround time of the application is increased. This paper proposes an active service migration (ASM) framework for computational offloading to cloud datacenters, which employs lightweight procedure for the deployment of runtime distributed platform. The proposed framework employs coarse granularity level and simple developmental and deployment procedures for computational offloading in MCC. ASM is evaluated by benchmarking prototype application on the Android devices in the real MCC environment. It is found that the turnaround time of the application reduces up to 45 % and ECC of the application reduces up to 33 % in ASM-based computational offloading as compared to traditional offloading techniques which shows the lightweight nature of the proposed framework for computational offloading.

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Acknowledgments

This work is part of the Mobile Cloud Computing research project at the Mobile Cloud Computing Research Laboratory 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 & Abdullah Gani

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  1. Muhammad Shiraz
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  2. Abdullah Gani
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Correspondence to Muhammad Shiraz.

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Shiraz, M., Gani, A. A lightweight active service migration framework for computational offloading in mobile cloud computing. J Supercomput 68, 978–995 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-013-1076-7

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