Resource Allocation for Cloud-Assisted Mobile Applications

Abstract

Mobile devices such as netbooks, smartphones, and tablets have made computing ubiquitous. However, such battery powered devices often have limited computing power for the benefit of an extended runtime. Nevertheless, despite the reduced processing power, users expect to perform the same types of operations as they could do using their desktop or laptop computers. We address mobile devices's lack of computing power by leveraging cloud computing resources. We present a middleware that relocates computing-intensive parts of Java applications to cloud re-sources. Consequently, our middleware enables the execution of computing-intensive applications on mo-bile devices. We present a case study on which we adapt Sunflow, an open-source ray tracing application, to use our middleware and show the results obtained by deploying it on Amazon EC2. We show, via simulations, a cost analysis of using the different resource allocation strategies available on our solution.