Mobile Cloud Computing: A Comparison Study of Cuckoo and Aiolos Offloading Frameworks

Currently, smart mobile devices are used for more than just calling and texting. They can run complex applications such as GPS, antivirus, and photo editor applications. Smart devices today offer mobility, flexibility, and portability, but they have limited resources and a relatively weak battery. As companies began creating mobile resource-hungry and power-hungry applications, they have realized that cloud computing was one of the solutions that they could utilize to overcome smart device constraints. Cloud computing helps decrease memory usage and improve battery life. Mobile cloud computing is the current and expanding research area focusing on methods that allow smart mobile devices to take full advantage of cloud computing. Code offloading is one of the techniques that is employed in cloud computing with mobile devices. This research compares two dynamic offloading frameworks to determine which one is better in terms of execution time and battery life improvement. While executing light tasks Cuckoo does better with local execution while Aiolos outperforms Cuckoo when offloading a light computation task to the cloud. Similarly, Aiolos performs better than Cuckoo when offloading a heavy computation task to an EC2 instance. Regarding battery consumption, offloading using either framework saves 23% more power than the local environment. Aiolos consumes less battery power than Cuckoo when offloading a heavy computation task.