Keep Your Nice Friends Close, but Your Rich Friends Closer -- Computation Offloading Using NFC

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel NFC-based computation offloading framework for smartphones, reducing energy consumption and execution time by leveraging low-power NFC communication and offloading to more powerful devices.

Contribution

It proposes and implements the first NFC-based offloading protocol, overcoming existing limitations and demonstrating energy and time savings in practical applications.

Findings

Offloading reduces energy consumption significantly.

Execution time decreases when offloading to more powerful devices.

NFC-based offloading is effective for computationally intensive tasks.

Abstract

The increasing complexity of smartphone applications and services necessitate high battery consumption but the growth of smartphones' battery capacity is not keeping pace with these increasing power demands. To overcome this problem, researchers gave birth to the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) research area. In this paper we advance on previous ideas, by proposing and implementing the first known Near Field Communication (NFC)-based computation offloading framework. This research is motivated by the advantages of NFC's short distance communication, with its better security, and its low battery consumption. We design a new NFC communication protocol that overcomes the limitations of the default protocol; removing the need for constant user interaction, the one-way communication restraint, and the limit on low data size transfer. We present experimental results of the energy consumption and the time duration of two computationally intensive representative applications: (i) RSA key generation and encryption, and (ii) gaming/puzzles. We show that when the helper device is more powerful than the device offloading the computations, the execution time of the tasks is reduced. Finally, we show that devices that offload application parts considerably reduce their energy consumption due to the low-power NFC interface and the benefits of offloading.