POWER: A cloud-based mobile augmentation approach for web- and cross-platform applications

Despite their continuously growing popularity, mobile end-user devices still suffer from limited computing resources. This complicates the use of complex mobile applications that require resource-intensive computations. Recently, several frameworks have been developed that enable mobile applications to follow the cloud-based mobile augmentation (CMA) approach. This approach defines a strategy to dynamically outsource resource-intensive tasks to external resources. None of the existing frameworks focuses on cross-platform applicability and interoperability issues. We propose an innovative approach, which provides a high level of flexibility in order to meet requirements of different mobile use cases and application scenarios. The POWER framework is applicable on all major mobile platforms and supports various types of external resources. Furthermore, we prove the feasibility of the proposed framework on current mobile end-user devices by means of a concrete implementation. Evaluation results yield significant performance boosts for resource-intensive tasks on mobile end-user devices. With the POWER framework we pave the way for complex mobile applications.