JavaScript Offloading for Web Applications in Mobile-Cloud Computing

Current mobile Web applications (a.k.a, Mobile Web apps) become quite computation-intensive by involving complex JavaScript, e.g., Data analytic applications and AI games, etc. In the context of mobile-cloud computing, computation offloading is a promising solution to improve performance and user experiences for mobile devices, and a lot of research efforts have been made for native apps. However, very few attentions have been paid on mobile Web apps. Compared to native apps, the dynamic feature of Web apps poses some challenging issues for computation offloading. To address these issues, this paper presents a systematic approach for augmenting JavaScript-based mobile Web apps. Our approach proposes a programming abstraction to extract "offload able" computation-intensive portions for facilitating Web developers to define when an offloading can occur. We implement a browser-based offloading runtime service and deploy it as a front-end proxy on cloud, to automatically partition the Web apps afore the mobile devices. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach with some typical computation-intensive Web apps across various high-end and low-end hardware specifications under Wi-Fi and cellular networks.