Power-Aware Wireless Transmission for Computation Offloading in Mobile Cloud

In today's mobile devices, the battery reservoir remains severely limited in capacity, making power consumption a key concern in the design and implementation of mobile applications. In this paper, we closely examine one widely adopted approach to improve the energy efficiency of mobile applicationsadaptively offloading the computation to the remote cloud. In particular, we measure the power consumption of computation offloading for two representative real-world mobile cloud applications under various wireless network conditions and identify the unique features of data transmission for computation offloading. We then formulate the power-aware scheduling problem for computation offloading and present a scheduling algorithm that makes adaptive offloading decisions according to the dynamic network conditions. Simulation results show that our proposed method can achieve better battery performance, which also reveal that computation-intensive and delay-tolerant tasks are more likely to benefit from offloading.