Computation Offloading: Is it Practical and Feasible?

Abstract

Mobile phones are usually poor in terms of battery, computation power and network bandwidth, which result in applications with limited functionality in terms of complex computations. A solution to this problem is “Computation Offloading”. By sending resource intensive computations to a server, precious resources like battery and processing power can be saved on a mobile device. In the past few years, many techniques have been proposed to approach this matter ranging from utilizing virtual machines with cloud servers and mobile network infrastructure to using nearby mobile devices to perform computation intensive tasks. This paper is a survey on existing techniques and systems for computation offloading and in light of those analyzes whether computation offloading is feasible to be deployed commercially with the current infrastructure and technology available. It also analyzes the major problems and identifies possible future research areas for computation offloading which may help in overcoming the current issues.