Tradeoff between energy savings and privacy protection in computation offloading

Offloading can save energy on mobile systems for computation-intensive applications. The mobile systems send programs and data to grid-powered servers where computation is performed. Offloading, however, causes privacy concerns because sensitive data may be sent to servers. This paper investigates how to protect privacy in computation offloading. We use steganography to hide data before sending them to servers. This paper evaluates the tradeoff between energy savings and privacy protection for content-based image retrieval with different steganographic techniques. We implement these methods on a PDA and compare their energy consumption, performance, and effectiveness of protecting privacy.