Android Elastic Service Execution and Evaluation

Context. Mobile devices recently have attained huge popularity in people’s life. During recent years, there have been many attempts for proposing several approaches to delegate and execute the computing intensive part of the mobile applications on more powerful remote servers due to shortage of resources on mobile devices. However, there are still research challenges in this area regarding the models as well as principles that govern circumstances of executing a part of mobile application remotely on a server along with effects of execution on the smartphone resources. Objectives. The aim behind conducting this research is to propose a model for executing the service component of an Android application on the remote server. This study exploits the enhancement of Android operating system functionality to execute services components on a remote powerful machine. It reports the model as well as the enhancements to achieve this purpose. Additionally, an experiment is conducted to realize what factors rule to execute a computation locally on mobile device or offload it to be executed on a remote machine. Methods. Two research methodologies have been used in preforming this research; Case study and controlled experiment. In the case study we investigates feasibility of functionality enhancement in Android operating system to run service components of Android applications on a remote server. We propose a new model for this purpose and motivate it by several different resources such as journal and conference papers and the Android developer site. A prototype of the model is implemented in order to put into use in the next part of our study. Second, a controlled experiment is conducted on the outcome prototype of the case study to explore the principles that governs executing the service component of Android application on a remote powerful machines and the affection of this execution on the mobile resources. Results. A Model for executing the service component of Android application on a powerful remote server is proposed. Also, a prototype implemented according to the Model. The effects of executing Android service components in a remote machine on energy consumption as well as performance of a smartphone are investigated. Moreover, we examined when would be beneficial to offload an intensive computation in order to be executed on the remote server. Conclusions. We conclude that it’s applicable to enhance the Android OS to execute service component of an Android application on a remote server. Also, We conclude that there is a strong coloration between amount of payload and computation of data that require to be executed on a remote server. Basically, offloading the computation is beneficial when there is a large amount of computation with small amount of communication and payload. Furthermore we conclude that the execution time for the intensive computations drastically increase when it’s executed on the server but for less computation data the performance is better when the execution is on the smartphone. Besides that, we express that the energy consumption on the smartphone growth gradually when the payload passes over a particular size