Cloud Computing for Mobile Devices - Reducing Energy Consumption

Abstract

Being powered by the batteries that are limited in their capacity is one of the main restrictions of mobile devices. Further enhancement of their characteristics and mobile Internet mounting speed incite the growth of user’s demands. Users request the most sophisticated applications to work rapidly and being available all the time. Thus, availability of mobile devices should not be decreased by inefficient energy consumption. This paper presents the approach which is able to decrease the power consumption on mobile gadgets. The core idea lies in migrating parts of the application’s functionality to remote servers in order to reduce energy consumption on the mobile device. Heavy-loaded code blocks are extracted from mobile apps and transferred to server-side applications. It is expected that, if energy spent on client-server communication is less than power needed to execute the task on phone or tablet; battery life time can be extended on the mobile device. Depending on the amount of data, available internet speed, and cloud computing capabilities, systems performance can also be affected. Experiments are conducted on migrating three Android applications to the cloud. The paper describes the migration approach, shows changes in energy consumption and demonstrates conditions to be met, when doing energy migrations to the cloud, successfully.