Design And Implementation Of The Computation Offloading Framework For Android Application

Android is an open source operating system for smart phone, According to statistic till the second quarter of2013android dominates nearly80%smartphone market share in the world and will continue to increase. Since2008the developers have produced more than500thousand Android apps on Google play. With the improvement of smart phone’s hardware, android apps try to provide more features to increase user experience. At the same time it exposes Android smart phone’s two obviously weaknesses.The first weakness is poor battery life. Complex Android apps usually consume a lot of energy, for example the top10downloaded Android apps on Google Play are all complex ones. To make things worse, relevant report said that the battery technology can’t gain big improvement in short time. Second, because of the different hardware configurations between the smart phones, the same android application runs on the different smart phone will gain different user experience.Generally speaking, if the smart phone is more powerful it will get better user experience. Instead, the lower hardware configuration of the phone will bring a poor user experience. Because of this reason some users will not use this application again and it will bring a big loss to the market and application developers. It has great significance to reduce applications’ power consumption and the requirements of hardware devices.Computation offloading intends to solve this problem by executing parts of the application on a remote server. Benefit from the powerful server, applications can reduce the execution time a lot and hence save power.This topic uses the computation offloading and provides an Android application computation offloading framework which will automatically partiton the android application into two parts at the compile stage. Developers should import some third part library into their project. After compile there will generate an apk file and a common jar file, which will be executed on the local phone and remote server respectively. Phone and server will communicate with each other through the network. This framework uses some offloading policy and offloading algorithm (Grivan-Newman algorithm) to keep the interaction between two parts as small as possible.This paper introduces the design and implementation of the computation offloading framework for android application and meanwhile analyzes the principal points of the technical details.