Software aging in mobile devices: Partial computation offloading as a solution

Long running applications on resource-constrained mobile devices can lead to software aging, which is a critical impediment to the mobile users due to its pervasive nature. Mobile offloading that migrates computation-intensive parts of applications from mobile devices onto resource-rich cloud servers, is an effective way for enhancing the availability of mobile services as it can postpone or prevent the software aging in mobile devices. Through partitioning the execution between the device side and the cloud side, the mobile device can have the most benefit from offloading in reducing utilisation of the device and increasing its lifetime. In this paper, we propose a path-based offloading partitioning (POP) algorithm to determine which portions of the application tasks to run on mobile devices and which portions on cloud servers with different cost models in mobile environments. The evaluation results show that the partial offloading scheme can significantly improve performance and reduce energy consumption by optimally distributing tasks between mobile devices and cloud servers, and can well adapt to changes in the environment.