A Low-Energy Fast Cyber Foraging Mechanism for Mobile Devices

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-energy, fast decision-making mechanism for cyber foraging in mobile devices, optimizing application offloading to surrogates based on context to improve response time and reduce energy use.

Contribution

It presents a novel context-aware decision mechanism for selecting optimal surrogate locations for application execution in cyber foraging systems.

Findings

Faster response times achieved

Lower energy consumption demonstrated

Improved application performance on mobile devices

Abstract

The ever increasing demands for using resource-constrained mobile devices for running more resource intensive applications nowadays has initiated the development of cyber foraging solutions that offload parts or whole computational intensive tasks to more powerful surrogate stationary computers and run them on behalf of mobile devices as required. The choice of proper mix of mobile devices and surrogates has remained an unresolved challenge though. In this paper, we propose a new decision-making mechanism for cyber foraging systems to select the best locations to run an application, based on context metrics such as the specifications of surrogates, the specifications of mobile devices, application specification, and communication network specification. Experimental results show faster response time and lower energy consumption of benched applications compared to when applications run wholly on mobile devices and when applications are offloaded to surrogates blindly for execution.