Bring the Cloud to Your Mobile: Transparent Offloading of HTML5 Web Workers

Abstract

Computation offloading is one of the approaches used for increasing application efficiency and decreasing energy consumption on consumer devices, an issue especially important for mobile appliances. While some such systems have been previously designed, very little research has been directed towards offloading code from web applications, an alternative to native solutions recently gaining in popularity. In this paper we attempt to narrow down this gap by presenting the first practical system for offloading HTML5 web workers from mobile web applications. The system is transparent to the programmer, i.e. Does not require any additional modifications to the original application to indicate which code parts should be offloaded. The results of the experiments with various sample applications have shown that for sufficiently complicated computations the offloading system can decrease both the processing time and energy consumption by even several hundred percent.