The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Smartphones suffer from limited computational capabilities. A method to mitigate these problems is code offloading: executing application code on a remote server. We introduce COARA, a middleware platform for code offloading on Android that uses aspect-oriented programming (AOP) with AspectJ. AOP allows COARA to intercept code for offloading without a customized compiler or modification of the operating system. COARA requires minimal changes to application source code. Since state transfer to the server is often a bottleneck that hinders performance, COARA uses AOP to intercept the transmission of large objects from the client and replaces them with object proxies. The server can begin execution of the offloaded application code, regardless of whether all required objects been transferred to the server. We run COARA with Android applications from the Google Play store on a Nexus 4 running unmodified Android 4.3 to prove that our platform improves performance. Our approach yields speedups of 24x and 6x over WiFi and 3G respectively.