Offloading for Mobile Device Performance Improvement

Abstract

Mobile devices are increasingly becoming part of everyday life. These include smart phones, tablets, wearable devices etc. Due to their mobility aspect, they are always constrained in their size and weight, which limits their resource capacity, e.g. processing power, and battery life. One possible solution for augmentation of such resource-constrained devices is through efficient usage of their surrounding resources, i.e. using some offloading technique. This paper studies how offloading of tasks to the surrounding resources affects on both the performance of task execution as well as the battery life of the mobile device. Two mobile phones and two tablets (from two different manufacturers) are studied in the experiments to find out the impact of the device characteristics. Two computationally demanding tasks, namely image processing and encryption/decryption, are used in these experiments. These results are compared to our earlier results on mobile devices of previous generations. We assumed that the increased computing power of new devices would make offloading obsolete. Our results show gains both in energy saving and in computational performance with these mobile devices. The comparison to our earlier results show that the performance increase of newer mobile device generations has not diminished the benefits of offloading. These results are in line with results presented in literature and they show that the offloading could offer a viable approach for resource augmentation of mobile devices towards edge/fog resources emphasized by the new 5G technology.