Dynamic software deployment from clouds to mobile devices

Abstract

With the functionality of mobile applications ever increasing, designers are often confronted with either the resource limitations of the devices or of the network. As pointed out by recent work, application partitioning between mobile devices and clouds, can be used to solve some of these issues, improving performance and/or battery life. In this paper, we argue that the static decisions made in existing work cannot leverage the full potential of application partitioning. Thus, to allow for variations in the execution environment, we have developed a system that dynamically adapts the application partition decisions. The system works by continuously profiling an applications performance and dynamically updating its distributed deployment to accommodate changes in the network bandwidth, devices CPU utilization, and data loads. Using several real applications, we show that our approach provides performance gains as high as 75% over traditional approaches and achieves lower power consumption by a factor close to 45%. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.