AIOLOS: Middleware for improving mobile application performance through cyber foraging

As the popularity of smartphones and tablets increases, the mobile platform is becoming a very important target for application developers. Despite recent advances in mobile hardware, most mobile devices fail to execute complex multimedia applications (such as image processing) with an acceptable level of user experience. Cyber foraging is a well-known computing technique to enhance the capabilities of mobile devices, where the mobile device offloads parts of the application to a nearby discovered server in the network. Although first introduced in 2001, cyber foraging is still not widely adopted in current smartphone platforms or applications. In this respect, two major challenges are to be tackled. First, a suitable adaptive decision engine is needed to determine the optimal offloading decision, that takes into account the potentially high and variable latency between the device and the server. Second, an integrated cyber foraging platform with sufficient support for application developers is not publicly available on popular mobile platforms such as Android. In this paper, we present AIOLOS, a mobile middleware framework for cyber foraging on the Android platform. AIOLOS uses an estimation model that takes into account server resources and network state to decide at runtime whether or not a method call should be offloaded. We also introduce developer tools to integrate the AIOLOS framework in the Android platform, enabling easy development of cyber foraging enabled applications. A prototype implementation is presented and evaluated in detail by means of both a chess application and a newly developed photo editor application. (c) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.