Elicit: Efficiently identify computation-intensive tasks in mobile applications for offloading

As mobile devices are battery powered and have less computing resources, plenty of research has been conducted on how to efficiently offload computing-intensive tasks in a mobile application to more powerful counterpart. However, prior research either implicitly assumes that the computing-intensive tasks are known in advance or the application developers will make special notations about them. In this paper, we design a framework Elicit to efficiently identify the computation-intensive tasks in mobile applications for offloading. Furthermore, we also consider the response time savings dynamically when deciding whether to offload a task based on the runtime system resources. A prototype of Elicit is built based on the Dalvik VM. Our evaluation with some popular Android applications from Google Play shows that Elicit can efficiently find an application´s computing-intensive task and save response time and energy consumption when these tasks are offloaded.