Selective mobile cloud offloading to augment multi-persona performance and viability

Abstract

Fueled by changes in professional application models, personal interests and desires and technological advances in mobile devices, multi-persona has emerged recently to keep balance between different aspects, in our daily life, on a single mobile terminal. In this context, mobile virtualization technology has turned the corner and currently heading towards widespread adoption to realize multi-persona. Although recent lightweight virtualization techniques were able to maintain balance between security and scalability of personas, the limited CPU power and insufficient memory and battery capacities, still threaten personas performance and viability. Throughout the last few years, cloud computing has cultivated and refined the concept of outsourcing computing resources, and nowadays, in the coming age of smartphones and tablets, the prerequisites are met for importing cloud computing to support resource constrained mobiles. From these premises, we propose in this paper a novel offloading-based approach that based on global resource usage monitoring, generic and adaptable problem formulation and heuristic decision making, is capable of augmenting personas performance and viability on mobile terminals. The experiments show its capability of reducing the resource usage overhead and energy consumption of the applications running in each persona, accelerating their execution and improving their scalability, allowing better adoption of multi-persona solution.