Offloadable Apps using SmartDiet: Towards an analysis toolkit for mobile application developers

Offloading work to cloud is one of the proposed solutions for increasing the battery life of mobile devices. Most prior research has focused on computation-intensive applications, even though such applications are not the most popular ones. In this paper, we first study the feasibility of method-level offloading in network-intensive applications, using an open source Twitter client as an example. Our key observation is that implementing offloading transparently to the developer is difficult: various constraints heavily limit the offloading possibilities, and estimation of the potential benefit is challenging. We then propose a toolkit, SmartDiet, to assist mobile application developers in creating code which is suitable for energy-efficient offloading. SmartDiet provides fine-grained offloading constraint identification and energy usage analysis for Android applications. In addition to outlining the overall functionality of the toolkit, we study some of its key mechanisms and identify the remaining challenges.