Energy efficiency in Mobile Cloud Computing: Total offloading selectively works. Does selective offloading totally work?

Many emerging mobile applications nowadays tend to be computation-intensive due to the increasing popularity and convenience of smartphones. Nevertheless, a major obstacle prohibits the direct adoption of such applications and that is battery lifetime. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is a promising solution that suggests the partial processing of applications on the cloud to minimize the overall power consumption at the mobile device. However, this does not necessarily save energy if there is no systematic mechanism for evaluating the effect of offloading the application into the cloud. In this paper, we study the factors affecting the power consumption due to offloading, develop a decision model, and verify its correctness by real implementation on an Android device. The results show that the proposed partitioning scheme successfully results in energy savings at the mobile handset and surpasses the energy efficiency of both fully local and fully remote execution.