MC-SkyNet: Mobile-cloud dynamic partitioning for mobile cloud applications

Mobile devices have limited resources including short battery life, storage capacity and processor performance. This limits the applications that can run on it. Mobile applications can be partitioned so that some of the application runs on a cloud. This works well for applications with relatively little data to be transferred and that do not have a high level of interactiveness with the user. Challenges with applications that have large amounts of data to be transferred and have a high level interactiveness is the high latency incurred by the wired network and packet loss of the wireless network. A cloudlet is a resource-rich computer or cluster of computers that is connected to the Internet and is available for use by nearby mobile devices. A mobile application can be partitioned so that part of it runs on the cloudlet. In this paper, we present the MC-Skynet framework which introduces fine-grained offloading approach and support for runtime and dynamic partitioning of an application. This is different from previous approaches, in that MC-Skynet not only provides dynamic partitioning and offloading, but is also adaptive to the changes of the state of a cloudlet by introducing a cloudlet mesh network and self-learningg decision making module to estimate the offloading cost.