Toward a unified elastic computing platform for smartphones with cloud support

Application offloading has been a popular approach to alleviate a tussle between resource-constrained smartphones and resource-hungry mobile applications. In this article, for leveraging cloud computing, we propose a unified elastic computing platform that supports application offloading for mobile devices, reducing energy consumption on smartphones. The proposed computing fabric consists of an infrastructure-based cloud and an ad hoc virtual cloud formed by a cluster of smartphones. We present both an offloading policy and a mechanism under which applications are delegated to the cloud for execution. For the former, we establish a unified optimization framework to decide where each task of the application should be executed - on the standalone smartphone, in the ad hoc virtual cloud, or in the infrastructure-based cloud. For the latter, we provide implementation strategies for application offloading. The proposed elastic computing platform can enhance the scalability of smartphones, fueling a new wave of innovative mobile applications, for example, anti-virus and gaming on smartphones.