Lightweight application-level task migration for mobile cloud computing

Abstract

Mobile cloud computing allows mobile applications to use the enormous resources in the clouds. In order to seamlessly utilize the resources, it is common to migrate computation among mobile nodes and cloud nodes. Therefore, a highly portable and transparent migration approach is needed. In terms of portability, application-level migration with code instrumentation is the most portable approach. However, in the existing literature, this approach imposes significant runtime overhead, even when no migration takes place. Most of these works are for mobile agents, and migrations are to be invoked by the programs. Migration points are also restricted to certain locations where migration status is being polled. In this paper, we propose a Java byte code transformation technique for realizing task migration without imposing significant overhead on normal execution. Asynchronous migration technique is used to allow migrations to take place virtually anywhere in the user codes, and the proposed Twin Method Hierarchy minimizes the overhead resulting from state-restoration codes in normal execution. We have implemented our approach in our middleware. The results show that our approach can allow lightweight computation migration at application level, achieve considerable speedups and utilize the cloud resources from mobile devices. © 2012 IEEE.