Improving the Trade-Off between Performance and Energy Saving in Mobile Devices through a Transparent Code Offloading Technique

The popularity of mobile devices has increased significantly, and nowadays they are used for the most diverse purposes like accessing the Internet or helping on business matters. Such popularity emerged as a consequence of the compatibility of these devices with a large variety of applications. However, the complexity of these applications boosted the demand for computational resources on mobile devices. Code Offloading is a solution that aims to mitigate this problem by reducing the use of resources and battery on mobile devices by sending parts of applications to be processed in the cloud. In this sense, this paper presents an evaluation of a transparent code offloading technique, where no modification in the application source code is required to allow the smartphone to send parts of the application to be processed in the cloud. We used a face detection application for the evaluation. Results showed the technique can improve applications performance in some scenarios, achieving speed-up of 12x in the best case.