Accelerating task completion in mobile offloading systems through adaptive restart

Abstract

Mobile application offloading is an efficient technique to unload the burden of intensive computation from thin clients to powerful servers. In a mobile offloading system, cloud computing is utilized to complete some heavy tasks which are migrated from resource-constrained mobile devices to the Cloud. To assure system performance, the quality of the wireless network connection plays an important role. In previous work we experimentally explored the impact of packet loss and delay in wireless networks on the completion time of an offloading task. We investigated a local restart mechanism to mitigate these effects. In the presence of unreliable communication, once the waiting time for the response of a cloud server exceeds a given threshold, exploiting the local resources of a mobile client can accelerate the task completion.