Ready, Set, Go: Coalesced offloading from mobile devices to the cloud

Abstract

With an abundance of computing resources, cloud computing systems have been widely used to elastically offload the execution of computation-intensive applications on mobile devices, leading to performance gains and better power efficiency. However, existing works have so far focused on one application only, and multiple applications are not coordinated when sending their offloading requests to the cloud. In this paper, we propose the new technique of coalesced offloading, which exploits the potential for multiple applications to coordinate their offloading requests with the objective of saving additional energy on mobile devices. The intuition is that, by sending these requests in “bundles,” the period of time that the network interface stays in the high-power state can be reduced. We present two online algorithms, collectively referred to as Ready, Set, Go (RSG), that make near-optimal decisions on how offloading requests from multiple applications are to be best coalesced. We show, both analytically and experimentally using actual smartphones, that RSG is able to achieve additional energy savings while maintaining satisfactory performance.