Mobile search and the cloud: The benefits of offloading

This paper presents the benefits and drawbacks of mobile desktop search coupled with cloud-assisted operations, such as operation offloading, cloud storage, and cloud-assisted search. The energy trade-off when offloading a task is analyzed and measured in several different scenarios. An example case of offloading indexing is presented. The problem of cloud-assisted mobile desktop search is introduced and a possible solution outlined. This paper argues that the synergy between mobile platforms and cloud computing is under-utilized and should be explored further, particularly in the search and synchronization use case. Our measurements support offloading (parts of) search related tasks to a cloud service.