Conceptual Approach Towards Stateful Computation Offloading in Resource Constraint Android Devices

Abstract

Cyber Foraging is an approach to resolve the performance and resource limitations of small portable hand-held devices, through offloading heavy processes to nearby stationary devices called Surrogate Devices, which have more computation capabilities. The way the Cyber Foraging is mostly tackled by invoking a remote method in the Surrogate Device – which contains the application related information as a pre-requisite – at the time of local invocation, in a state-less manner. This limits the possibilities where the Cyber Foraging can be used in statefull context, which can provide maintenance of state which will help the developer to transmit state of objects used inside the offload candidate so it won’t differ from local execution and remote execution. In order to use in a stateful manner, researchers have used a virtualisation approach, which is a resource consuming approach. As an alternative, we propose a conceptual solution to transmit state from mobile platform to the surrogate platform, without having to deploy a mobile OS virtual machine into the surrogate environment. The concept will address all the drawbacks of virtualisation and provide the similar benefits at a lower resource cost in the Surrogate end.