Mobile code offloading: from concept to practice and beyond

The emerging mobile cloud has expanded the horizon of application development and deployment with techniques such as code offloading. While offloading has been widely considered for saving energy and increasing responsiveness of mobile devices, the technique still faces many challenges pertaining to practical usage. In this article, we adopt a systemic approach for analyzing the components of a generic code offloading architecture. Based on theoretical and experimental analysis, we identify the key limitations for code offloading in practice and then propose solutions to mitigate these limitations. We develop a generic architecture to evaluate the proposed solutions. The results provide insights regarding the evolution and deployment of code offloading.