The increasing complexity of smartphone applications and services necessitate high battery consumption but the growth of smartphones' battery capacity is not keeping pace with these increasing power demands. To overcome this problem, researchers gave birth to the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) research area. In this paper we advance on previous ideas, by proposing and implementing the first known Near Field Communication (NFC)-based computation offloading framework. This research is motivated by the advantages of NFC's short distance communication, with its better security, and its low battery consumption. We design a new NFC communication protocol that overcomes the limitations of the default protocol; removing the need for constant user interaction, the one-way communication restraint, and the limit on low data size transfer. We present experimental results of the energy consumption and the time duration of two computationally intensive representative applications: (i) RSA key generation and encryption, and (ii) gaming puzzles. We show that when the helper device is more powerful than the device offloading the computations, the execution time of the tasks is reduced. Finally, we show that devices that offload application parts considerably reduce their energy consumption due to the low-power NFC interface and the benefits of offloading.
Seen that mobile code offloading has already become well accepted and its advantages have been acknowledged by many authors, researchers lately have been focusing on building more solid frameworks that consider long neglected aspects, such as security, fault--tolerance, caching, etc. @cite_21 . @cite_22 replicate mobile applications, which are split into execution phases in mobile servers, efficiently selecting the proper replica to proceed in the next phase, in order to improve the end users' quality of experience. propose a security protocol for authentication between NFC applications and proximal cloudlets motivated by the fact that NFC applications can be computationally demanding @cite_17 .
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Modern applications face new challenges in managing today's highly distributed and heterogeneous environment. For example, they must stitch together code that crosses smartphones, tablets, personal devices, and cloud services, connected by variable wide-area networks, such as WiFi and 4G. This paper describes Sapphire, a distributed programming platform that simplifies the programming of today's mobile cloud applications. Sapphire's key design feature is its distributed runtime system, which supports a flexible and extensible deployment layer for solving complex distributed systems tasks, such as fault-tolerance, code-offloading, and caching. Rather than writing distributed systems code, programmers choose deployment managers that extend Sapphire's kernel to meet their applications' deployment requirements. In this way, each application runs on an underlying platform that is customized for its own distribution needs. The availability of NFC capabilities on smartphones has facilitated the development of a large number of related applications. Some of these applications may be resource-intensive tasks, and Cloudlets-based mobile computing are a good candidate to offload computation while being free of WAN delays, jitter, congestion, and failures. In this context, new use cases dedicated to NFC applications based on cloudlets are presented and a security protocol is proposed to authenticate the cloudlets by the mobile devices. The secure element of the mobile device is a trust environment used to store sensitive data and to perform cryptographic calculations.