Offloading work to cloud is one of the proposed solutions for increasing the battery life of mobile devices. Most prior research has focused on computation-intensive applications, even though such applications are not the most popular ones. In this paper, we first study the feasibility of method-level offloading in network-intensive applications, using an open source Twitter client as an example. Our key observation is that implementing offloading transparently to the developer is difficult: various constraints heavily limit the offloading possibilities, and estimation of the potential benefit is challenging. We then propose a toolkit, SmartDiet, to assist mobile application developers in creating code which is suitable for energy-efficient offloading. SmartDiet provides fine-grained offloading constraint identification and energy usage analysis for Android applications. In addition to outlining the overall functionality of the toolkit, we study some of its key mechanisms and identify the remaining challenges.
Specific solutions, such as Catnap @cite_4 , have been proposed in the literature for reducing the communication energy cost by applying a proxy or middlebox approach. However, these solutions will provide energy savings only for the communication part of the program, whereas offloading simultaneously provides savings in computational costs. Furthermore, since systems such as Catnap do not execute application logic at the proxy, all traffic must eventually reach the mobile device. With smart offloading, some part of the traffic (e.g., signaling) might never need to reach the mobile device, because the offloaded part of the program handles it directly.
@cite_4
2020240447
Energy management is a critical issue for mobile devices, with network activity often consuming a significant portion of the total system energy. In this paper, we propose Catnap, a system that reduces energy consumption of mobile devices by allowing them to sleep during data transfers. Catnap exploits high bandwidth wireless interfaces -- which offer significantly higher bandwidth compared to available bandwidth across the Internet -- by combining small gaps between packets into meaningful sleep intervals, thereby allowing the NIC as well as the device to doze off. Catnap targets data oriented applications, such as web and file transfers, which can afford delay of individual packets as long as the overall transfer times do not increase. Our evaluation shows that for small transfers (128kB to 5MB), Catnap allows the NIC to sleep for up to 70 of the total transfer time and for larger transfers, it allows the whole device to sleep for a significant fraction of the total transfer time. This results in battery life improvement of up to 2-5x for real devices like Nokia N810 and Thinkpad T60.