Mobile App Acceleration via Fine-Grain Offloading to the Cloud

Abstract

Mobile device hardware can limit the sophistication of mobile applications. One strategy for side-stepping these constraints is to opportunistically offload computations to the cloud, where more capable hardware can do the heavy lifting. We propose a platform that accomplishes this via compressive offloading, a novel application of compressive sensing in a distributed shared memory setting. Our prototype gives up to an order-of-magnitude acceleration and 60% longer battery life to the end user of an example handwriting recognition app. We argue that offloading is beneficial to both end users and cloud providers—the former experiences a performance boost and the latter receives a steady stream of small computations to fill periods of under-utilization. Such workloads, originating from ARM-based mobile devices, are especially well-suited for offloading to emerging ARM-based data centers.