A survey of computation offloading strategies for performance improvement of applications running on mobile devices

Computation offloading addresses the issue of limited resources by transferring the computation workload to other systems having better resources. It may be oriented towards extending battery lifetime, enhancing storage capacity or improving the performance of an application. In this paper, we perform a survey of the computation offloading strategies correlated with performance improvement for an application. We categorize these approaches in terms of their workload distribution and offloading decisions. We also describe the evolution of the computation offloading based environment as well as a categorization of application partitioning mechanisms adopted in various contributions. Furthermore, we present a parameter-wise comparison of automated frameworks, the application domains that benefit from computation offloading and the future challenges impeding the evolution of computation offloading.