OFFLOADING FOR MOBILE DEVICES: A SURVEY

Modern handheld devices, such as smartphones and tablets, offer portability, increased computational power, and communication capabilities. Among their characteristics there are: connectivity, processing capabilities, sensing abilities, pervasiveness, heterogeneity, and limited battery supply. The limited battery supply and processing capabilities, at least in respect to the user demand, are the characteristics that trigger most the interest in offloading research. The connectivity supports the offloading process, while the heterogeneity provides several challenges. Given the characteristics mobile devices possess, they are an attractive option for users to interact with each other, through social applications, and with their environment, through home automation. The popularity of mobile devices can be seen in many ways. Facebook, who has announced recently their increase to over 1 billion monthly active users, reports that more than a half of their users reach their social network using a mobile device [6]. People use mobile devices daily in activities ranging from entertainment to solving professional tasks. Mobile applications span a vast application-domain, being developed for various purposes, such as gaming, multimedia streaming, travel, communication, etc. Many of these types of applications rely on connectivity and on data stored remotely. Also, many of them make a lot of use of the high computation power of mobile devices. Among this generous application space, there are several types of applications that would benefit from offloading: • applications that are computational intensive (e.g. Chess)