Supporting mobility-aware computational offloading in mobile cloud environment

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) enables resource-constrained smartphones to run high processing and storage intensive applications through public clouds or cloudlet code offloading. However, handover support in the MCC context has not been thoroughly explored, since most works do not address the devices mobility during the offloading operation. This paper presents the Mobile Offloading System (MOSys), which supports seamless offloading operations during user mobility between wireless networks. To this end, MOSys benefits from the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm for mobility management and remote caching techniques to reduce the offloading response time. Also, middleware is responsible for ensuring code and data offloading, profiling service, cloud discovery and application deployment. To evaluate the proposed system and to analyze mobility impact on the offloading performance, several experiments were conducted using different smartphones categories and benchmark applications, on three scenarios. Our results have shown that the MOSys' mobility management application is energy efficient, especially considering the low-cost smartphone category, while remote caching proved to be an attractive alternative for reducing the offloading response time.