Energy impact of secure computation on a handheld device

Computation offloading is an important approach to save the energy consumption while improving performance for wireless networked handheld devices. With such an approach, computational tasks are offloaded from the handheld device to a server, depending on the tradeoff between the communication cost and the computation cost. Adding security to the wireless network changes the relative cost of computation and communication. In this paper, we measure the energy consumption characteristics of multimedia applications on a handheld device, supported by computation offloading though a wireless LAN which is secured with IPsec. The measurement indicates that despite the overhead of the security mechanism, offloading remains quite effective as a method to reduce program execution time and energy consumption.