Journal of Network and Computer Applications 119 (2018) 83–96

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Journal of Network and Computer Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jnca

Review

Partitioning and offloading in smart mobile devices for mobile cloud T

computing: State of the art and future directions
Fei Gua,b, Jianwei Niua,b,∗, Zhiping Qia,b, Mohammed Atiquzzamanc
a
State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
b
Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Big Data and Brain Computing (BDBC), Beihang University, China
c
School of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019-6151, USA

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Mobile applications, such as augment reality, natural language processing, object recognition and multimedia-
Mobile cloud computing based services, are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and can provide better user experience on mobile devices.
Partitioning However, such applications are draining increasingly more computational resources and energy of mobile de-
Offloading vices. Partitioning and offloading some parts of mobile applications is a promising method of saving time and
Computation and communication overheads
energy for mobile devices with con-strained resources. Most of current researches have focused on designing
Energy consumption
effective offloading systems to save time and energy while giving limited consideration to enabling techniques.
Moreover, researchers have seldom paid attention to different computation resources in offloading frameworks.
In this paper, we present the state-of-the-art enabling techniques and different computational resources used for
partitioning and offloading. We also investigate mobile cloud computing and relevant paradigms from the
perspective of partitioning and offloading enabling techniques. Then we propose a taxonomy of these parti-
tioning and offloading techniques and survey some well-established offloading frameworks. Based on our tax-
onomy, we compare these offloading frameworks and show some offloading schemes. Furthermore, we discuss
open research issues and challenges to partitioning and offloading.

1. Introduction
With the development of wireless technology, mobile devices, such
as smartphones and smart watches, are becoming the most effective
tools for communication in human's daily life (Dinh et al., 2013;
Widodo et al., 2017; Bai et al., 2004). The popularity and availability of
mobile devices can help mobile users enrich experience of various
services provided by mobile applications without the constrain of time
and place (Sanaei et al., 2014; Fu et al., 2005a; Fu et al., 2005b).
However, the resources of mobile devices are constrained. With limited
weight, size and battery life, the computational resources of mobile
devices, such as disk capacity, memory size and running speed, are
restricted (Shaukat et al., 2016). Since the computation technologies on
mobile devices are evolving day by day, the performance of mobile
devices still lags behind that of traditional nonmobile computers. While
running on mobile devices with constrained resources, mobile appli-
cations, such as speech recognizers (Kristensen, 2007; Su and Flinn,
2005), natural language translators (Balan et al., 2007; Flinn et al.,
2002), optical character recognizers (Balan et al., 2007), wireless
network scheduling (Yu et al., 2017; Reaz et al., 2006), network ana-
lysis (Chowdhury et al., 2006; Fu and Atiquzzaman, 2005) and image
processors (Kristensen and Bouvin, 2008; Porras et al., 2009) require
higher disk capacity, computing speed, and battery lifetime than other
applications. Moreover, compared with other applications that are
currently supported on mobile devices, these applications require faster
response.
Although many researchers have paid attention to incorporating
multiple core processors of high performance into mobile devices and
improving the efficiency of computational algorithms, the gap between
the capacity of the existing mobile devices and the increasing compu-
tation resources is growing (Lin et al., 2012; Goulding-Hotta et al.,
2011). To bridge the gap, cloud has been used to share the computation
and power pressure of mobile devices (Armbrust et al., 2010; Zhang
et al., 2010; Buyya et al., 2009). The Cloud Data Center (CDC), which
comprises of thousands of servers, storages, and network devices in-
terconnected with each other, is an ideal candidate for augmentation of
computation tasks with resource-constrained mobile devices (Shuja
et al., 2016). By leveraging computing resources and services of CDCs,

∗
Corresponding author. State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing
100191, China.
E-mail address: niujianwei@buaa.edu.cn (J. Niu).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2018.06.009
Received 11 March 2018; Received in revised form 31 May 2018; Accepted 19 June 2018
Available online 27 June 2018
1084-8045/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
F. Gu et al.
Fig. 1. Architecture of MCC. It consists of mobile devices communication technology, and cloud server.
mobile devices can alleviate their overhead and run smoothly. Mobile
Cloud Computing (MCC) aims to create new software level solutions on
the application layer for improving the performance of mobile devices.
Partitioning and offloading is an application layer solution which can
alleviate the pressure of mobile devices (Singh and Andrews, 2014; Ou
et al., 2007). It divides computation tasks into two parts: one part runs
locally, and the other one is uploaded and runs on a remote cloud. MCC
can augment the application processing performance of mobile devices
through offloading techniques (Huerta-Canepa and Lee, 2010; Zhang
et al., 2011). Instead of executing the applications on mobile devices,
the resource-intensive segments of the application can be executed on
the cloud via wired or wireless channel. In this way, the abundant cloud
resources in terms of storage and processing of the data can be utilized
to provide a faster calculation. It is demonstrated that offloading on
mobile devices could benefit for many domains (Chun et al., 2011;
Cuervo et al., 2010; Kosta et al., 2012).
A number of surveys on partitioning and offloading from various
perspectives have been conducted (Bhattacharya and De, 2017;
Abolfazli et al., 2014; Forkan et al., 2017; Gunnam et al., 2007). Dinh
et al. (2013) described the concept of computation offloading and its
applications in different fields. Sharifi et al. (2012) presented the
methods to implement offloading. In (Shaukat et al., 2016), a taxonomy
of solutions based on cloudlets is presented. Ahmed et al. discussed
(Ahmed et al., 2015b) the seamless execution of applications in MCC
with a focus on applications and system virtualization based frame-
works. Abolfazli et al. (2014) conducted a survey of mobile-cloud
augmentation frameworks with the perspective of mobile-cloud proxi-
mity and mobility. However, most of these surveys have discussed di-
verse strategies for alleviating the pressure of smart mobile devices
without focusing on enabling techniques and different resources used
for partitioning and offloading. To the best of our knowledge, this study
is the first effort to comprehensively propose the taxonomy of enabling
techniques and to classify some famous offloading frameworks ac-
cording to our taxonomy.
The contributions of this paper are as follows:
• We analyze the existing MCC offloading frameworks, and discuss the
enabling techniques and computation resources used for parti-
tioning and offloading.
• We propose a comprehensive taxonomy of current partitioning and
offloading schemes considering all parameters, including enabling
technique, offload infrastructure, augmentation model, commu-
nication model, partitioning model, programming language support,
application partitioning, application profiler, optimization model,
allocation decision and granularity.
• After carefully analyzing some famous partitioning and offloading
frameworks, we evaluate the performance of these frameworks in
terms of different parameters proposed in our taxonomy.
• We investigate the vital partitioning and offloading decisions that
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Journal of Network and Computer Applications 119 (2018) 83–96
influence the performance of partitioning and offloading. Some
offloading schemes are demonstrated and we also present open
challenges for future research.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows, Section 2 de-
scribes the fundamental concepts of mobile cloud computing, parti-
tioning and offloading. A taxonomy of enabling techniques and some
major frameworks on partitioning and offloading are presented in
Sections 3 and 4, respectively. Section 5 gives our classification of these
major frameworks based on the proposed taxonomy. Section 6 presents
offloading decisions and schemes, and Section 7 shows the challenges
for future research. At last, Section 8 concludes the paper.
2. Background
The fundamental concepts of MCC and the theoretical aspects of
partitioning and offloading are presented in this section.
2.1. Mobile cloud computing
MCC is a computing schedule, which extends the computing version
of clouds to mobile devices with constrained resources (Shiraz et al.,
2013b; Marston et al., 2011; Alzahrani et al., 2014). It combines the
advantages of different technologies, such as service oriented com-
puting (Wei and Blake, 2010), virtualization (Vaquero et al., 2008), and
grid computing (Foster et al., 2008). MCC empowers mobile devices
beyond their intrinsic capabilities, provides various computational re-
sources to mobile users (Buyya et al., 2009) and focuses on alleviating
limitations of resources of mobile devices by employing energy aug-
mentation, storage augmentation, and computational ability augmen-
tation (Shaukat et al., 2016). MCC model has three main components:
mobile device, communication technology and cloud server. A mobile
device utilizes available communication technology protocols such as
3G or 4G, LTE, and Wi-Fi to connect to the cloud server. However, the
bandwidth of the network may be constrained, and the connection is
often unreliable and suffers from latency issues. To overcome these
problems, mobile devices employ cloud servers to accomplish compu-
tation tasks with minimum network communication (Ahmed et al.,
2015a; Ahmed et al., 2015c). Fig. 1 shows an architecture of MCC. The
cloud server provides the storage, processing, computing, and security
mechanism for mobile devices through communication technologies. In
MCC, service providers provide services in the form of various models,
namely, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), as shown in Fig. 2.
2.2. Partitioning and offloading
For improving use experiences, we expect mobile devices can run a
variety of applications. However, due to the constraint of weight, size
F. Gu et al. Journal of Network and Computer Applications 119 (2018) 83–96

Fig. 2. Architecture of Layered Cloud Computing. It has 3 components in-

cluding IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

and battery life, the computation resources of mobile devices, such as

disk capacity, memory, and execution speed, are often limited
(Satyanarayanan, 2015). As one of major applications of MCC, off-
loading aims at augmenting the capability of mobile systems by trans-
porting parts of computational tasks to remote servers (Kumar et al.,
2013). This procedure is accomplished by executing a portion of tasks
of mobile devices on cloud servers. The performance of offloading so-
lutions is related to not only Internet connectivity, but also cloud re-
sources. Moreover, the partitioning strategies also play an important
role in offloading deployment.
The components of an offloading system are shown in Fig. 3. The
mobile device and the remote server are connected through a wireless
network. Portions of the computation tasks are uploaded to computa-
tion resources in the remote server, such as a personal computer (Ra Fig. 4. Flowchart for application partitioning and offloading.
et al., 2011), a server (Satyanarayanan et al., 2013) or a cloud server
(Chun et al., 2011). While handling variations in components, users can The process of partitioning should identify the part uploaded to the
expect Quality of Experience (QoE) to be supported by offloading sys- cloud for running. The flowchart of the procedure of the application
tems. partitioning and offloading for mobile cloud computing is shown in
Recently, there are many offloading schedules proposed to alleviate Fig. 4. Various algorithms (Chen et al., 2004; Chu et al., 2004; Hong
the limitation of computation ability of mobile devices (Hung et al., et al., 2009; Li et al., 2001) have been proposed for partitioning the
2012; Shiraz and Gani, 2014; Goyal and Carter, 2004). To execute a computation between mobile devices and servers. Nowadays, there are
distributed mobile application, the offloading framework should con- many methods for implementing application offloading. Generally
sider the application partitioning problem. Specifically, the framework speaking, the offloading frameworks can partition and offload compu-
should decide which part of tasks should be executed locally and which tational load of different granularity levels to remote cloud servers.
part should be uploaded to cloud server for running (Kumar et al., Partitioning has two types including static partitioning and dynamic
2013). Partitioning application aims to divide the application into se- partitioning. Static partitioning aims to partition the intensive portions
parate portions, and preserve the semantics of the original application. of computation load, and dynamic partitioning can dynamically address

Fig. 3. Typical architecture of a computation offloading system.

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F. Gu et al. Journal of Network and Computer Applications 119 (2018) 83–96

Fig. 5. Taxonomy of MCC offloading frameworks. The MCC offloading techniques include enabling technique, offload infrastructure, augmentation model, com-
munication model, partitioning model, programming language support, application profiling, optimization mode, allocation decision, granularity, objective and
application partitioning.

the application partitioning load on mobile devices at runtime. migration. System virtualization can provide low power consumption,
easy server consolidation and dynamic reconfiguration, etc. As a result,
it is easier to build high performance servers (Beloglazov and Buyya,
3. Taxonomy of partitioning and offloading approaches
2012; Tawalbeh et al., 2015). Application virtualization solutions are
available in most smartphones in the form of the Dalvik VM (Android
As there are different purposes of offloading the local application to
OS) and. Net runtime environments (Windows Mobile OS). An appli-
a remote server and the constrains are not in complete accordance,
cation executing in an application VM can be offloaded to a similar
there exist different ways to classify approaches for partitioning and
virtual instance over the cloud (Shiraz et al., 2013a; Kord and Haghighi,
offloading. We analyze the published taxonomic standards in recent
2013). In process code migration, the amount of the data to be off-
years, then propose a taxonomy of current partitioning and offloading
loaded is small, and Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) emulation, such
approaches, as shown in Fig. 5, and classify current algorithms based on
as Qemu and gem5 (Ahmed et al., 2015b; Shuja et al., 2016), is required
our taxonomy.
during offloading process state between heterogeneous processors.
Enabling Technique: MCC offload enabling techniques include
Offloading Infrastructure: The offload infrastructure can be
system virtualization, application virtualization and process code

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F. Gu et al.
categorized as cloud, cloudlet, and mobile ad-hoc. Different frame-
works fit with different offloading strategies. The cloud based offload
faces the challenge of proximity from mobile clients (Han et al., 2014;
Flores et al., 2014; Simanta et al., 2012). This challenge can be ad-
dressed by the cloudlet based infrastructure. The cloudlet based ar-
chitecture is deployed close to smart mobile devices, which merges the
overlay with the base and then executes the application from the state
stored in the VM overlay (Miluzzo et al., 2012; Satyanarayanan et al.,
2009). The mobile ad-hoc based framework consisting of four main
components for managing resources, applications, contexts and off-
loading to the cloud, is established by proximate collaborative smart
phone devices to facilitate each other in computing intensive task off-
loading (Wu et al., 2015; Abolfazli et al., 2014).
Augmentation Model: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are common service
models for augmenting cloud computation. The augmentation model
has a one-to-one association with enabling technique. System virtuali-
zation enables offloading frameworks augment to the cloud through
IaaS model (Tawalbeh et al., 2015; Beloglazov and Buyya, 2012), while
application virtualization utilizes PaaS model to augment offloading
frameworks (Vecchiola et al., 2009; Shiraz et al., 2013a). Process code
migration based on MCC offloading frameworks uses SaaS model
through cross-platform emulators (Ahmed et al., 2015c; Dinh et al.,
2013).
Communication Model: Generally, the resource-constrained mo-
bile devices can communicate with resource-rich servers in a client-
server model. However, in some circumstances, such as mobile ad-hoc
cloud, as all mobile clients are on equal footing, mobile devices can
communicate with the server in a peer-to-peer model, and each mobile
device can utilize the resources of another mobile device in a colla-
borative network (Mohammad et al., 2015; Rahimi et al., 2014).
Partitioning Model: The attribute of the partitioning model in-
dicates the type of partitioning model employed to model the compo-
nents of the mobile application and its capability. Graph-based, Linear
Programming-based (LPbased) and the hybrid are common application
partitioning algorithms. The LP-based algorithm is used to profile the
model of the current situation and constraint formula (Kovachev,
2012). The graph-based algorithm is to profile a calling graph (Niu
et al., 2014). The edges and points stand for the application and the
calling relationships, respectively. Compared with the LP-based algo-
rithm, it is harder to profile a graph as the calling relationship is
complex. However, the LP-based algorithm is less efficient than the
graph-based method. The hybrid method can trade off the LP-based and
the graph-based algorithms.
Programming Language Support: Programming language support
indicates the selected programming language in the process of parti-
tioning (Bialek et al., 2004). Different sources are written by different
languages and transportability of programming code is an important
factor. The programming environment is limited in some partitioning
approaches (Yang et al., 2013) and some frameworks are made by
several languages. If an partitioning framework can be implemented
with many programming languages, we call it universal programming
language support (Ra et al., 2012).
Application Partitioning: The partitioning strategy can be the
static, dynamic, or hybrid analysis. With the static analysis, the appli-
cation specific and offline profile based strategy can implement the
partitioning procedure. In this approach, resources can be segmented
quickly. However, it cannot adapt to the environment automatically.
This is a mortal disadvantage, as in the situation when the bandwidth
changes a lot, static analysis may have less advantages. Although dy-
namic analysis can adapt to the environment such as a network, and
resource situation, it will consume a lot of time and space. Hybrid
analysis is a trade off method that can balance the cost for analysis and
the adaptive capability (Ahmed et al., 2015c; Shaukat et al., 2016).
Application Profiler: Different factors may exert effects of different
degrees on cost of partitioning and offloading. In some cases, the net-
work fluctuation may have a huge influence on the result of
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Journal of Network and Computer Applications 119 (2018) 83–96
partitioning. In some cases, the hardware amelioration is better than a
good network situation. Generally speaking, there are three main types
of profilers. The hardware profiler is used to profile the model by the
physics factors, such as CPU utilization (Agrawal et al., 1998; Zhang
et al., 2009). The network profiler measures the network parameters
such as connectivity, bandwidth, and signal strength (Zahran et al.,
2006; Ramamurthy et al., 1999). The software profiler measures the
application parameters, such as instruction count (Ahmad et al., 2015;
Song et al., 2015).
Optimization Model: The optimization techniques used in MCC
offloading frameworks are used to lower the communicational or
computational cost (Ahmed et al., 2015b). These optimization methods
include task based optimization, network optimization and offload
decision optimization. The task based optimization method is used to
optimize offloading tasks to achieve the highest efficiency (Kosta et al.,
2012). The network optimization method is used either to compress the
offload code or to identify proximate cloud resources (Lyu et al., 2017).
The offload decision optimization method is used to determine whether
to migrate computation or not (Kumar et al., 2013).
Allocation Decision: Allocation decision means the decision is
formulated locally or remotely. If the decision is made during the
running time, we call it online decision. On the contrary, if a decision is
done before offloading, it is an offline decision. If the decision is neither
online nor offline, it is hybrid.
Granularity: The attribute of the granularity attribute of an appli-
cation partitioning algorithm indicates the level of granularity of par-
titioning. The granularity levels of partitioning of current applications
can be categorized as allocation-site level (Sinha and Kulkarni, 2011),
bundle level (Giurgiu et al., 2012; Kovachev, 2012), class level (Abebe
and Ryan, 2011; Gu et al., 2003), component level (Bialek et al., 2004;
Chu et al., 2004), hybrid level (Abebe and Ryan, 2011), method level
(Cuervo et al., 2010), module level (Yang et al., 2012; Balan et al.,
2007), object level (Tilevich and Smaragdakis, 2002; Niu et al., 2014),
task level (Wang and Li, 2004; Goraczko et al., 2008) and thread level
(Chun et al., 2011; Newton et al., 2009).
The allocation-site level means that the levels of allocation site are
partitioned, and the object of partitioning is regarded as a single unit
(Sinha and Kulkarni, 2011). The bundle level means that the parti-
tioning object is groups of Java classes (Giurgiu et al., 2012). The class
level means that classes of the application are partitioned for offloading
(Ou et al., 2006). The component level denotes that the application is
partitioned into separate components for offloading to the remote
server (Ra et al., 2012). The hybrid level means that the framework has
different granularity for partitioning (Abebe and Ryan, 2011). The
method level means that methods of the application are partitioned for
offloading (Cuervo et al., 2010). The module level means modules of
the application is partitioned and offloaded (Yang et al., 2012). The
object level means that the application is partitioned by object for
offloading (Tilevich and Smaragdakis, 2002). The task level denotes the
partitioning object is task (Wang and Li, 2004). The thread level depicts
the threads of an application are partitioned (Newton et al., 2009).
Objective: The main objective of partitioning and offloading is to
improve the ability of computation (Yang et al., 2013) and to save
energy. Schemes for partitioning and offloading can be classified ac-
cording to the following objectives.
• Improving performance: Partitioning algorithms tend to increase
throughput (Yang et al., 2013), adaptation time and efficacy (Abebe
and Ryan, 2011), algorithm efficiency and cost effectiveness (Ou
et al., 2006), latency (Cuervo et al., 2010; Chu et al., 2004), ex-
ecution time (Giurgiu et al., 2012; Niu et al., 2014) and CPU
workload (Newton et al., 2009) of the framework.
• Reducing network overhead: Schemes in this category consider
network overhead for offloading (Abebe and Ryan, 2011; Newton
et al., 2009; Verbelen et al., 2013).
• Reducing programmers' burden: Programmers are encouraged with
F. Gu et al. Journal of Network and Computer Applications 119 (2018) 83–96

low input in the process of partitioning for reducing their burden

(Cuervo et al., 2010; Chu et al., 2004).
• Reducing memory constraints: The memory restriction on smart
mobile devices can be alleviated by partitioning (Abebe and Ryan,
2011; Gu et al., 2003).
• Multi-site offloading: Several remote servers are used in the process
of partitioning (Sinha and Kulkarni, 2011).
• Updating application dynamically: There is no need to shut down
the application and remote servers during partitioning (Bialek et al.,
2004).
• Saving energy: Power consumption and battery life are crucial fac-
tors in partitioning algorithms (Cuervo et al., 2010; Giurgiu et al.,
2012; Abebe and Ryan, 2011).

4. Partitioning and offloading frameworks

In this section, we revise a number of well-established frameworks
for partitioning and offloading. These frameworks focus on different
aspects of partitioning and offloading to alleviate resource restrictions
in mobile devices. We then compare these systems in terms of context
awareness, latency, bandwidth utilization, privacy, complexity and
security, as shown in Table 1.
4.1. MAUI
Mobile Assistance Using Infrastructure (MAUI; Cuervo et al., 2010)
is a dynamic partitioning framework focusing on saving energy of smart
mobile devices. MAUI can provide the code of fine-grained application
offloading with minimum programmer operation, aiming to improve
the performance of offloading systems for current smart devices. The
architecture of MAUI is shown in Fig. 6. The smartphone side consists of
a solver interface, a proxy and a profiler. The solver interface is used to
facilitate the offloading decisions made for saving energy. The proxy
handles the control and data transfer of offloading frameworks. The
profiler establishes the program, measures the program's energy, and
collects requirements for data transfer. The server side includes four
components: profiler, server side proxy, decision engine, and MAUI
controller.
To save energy, MAUI uses fine-grained offloading code to minimize
the changes required to applications and perform computation tasks on
smart devices and remote servers using Microsoft. NET Common
Language Runtime (CLR; Richter, 2006). MAUI measures wireless
connectivity, such as latency and bandwidth of the network, and
combines network and CPU costs to provide an effective solution for
determining how to partition the application during running, so as to
obtain the maximum energy savings with current networking condi-
tions. MAUI can ease the burden of programmers by combining code
portability, reflection, serialization, and type safety.
Fig. 6. Architecture of MAUI (Cuervo et al., 2010). The smartphone side con-
sists of a solver interface, a proxy and a profiler, while the server side includes
four components: profiler, server side proxy, decision engine, and MAUI con-
troller.
wireless link such as Wi-Fi with a single-hop distance. In these systems,
applications are usually partitioned into two portions: one is a client
running on mobile devices and the other is a computation-intensive
server running on the cloudlet. Fig. 7 shows that a typical architecture
of cloudlet-based system consists of a cloudlet host and a mobile client.
A discovery service can provide for offloading the cloudlet metadata
ranging from a simple IP address and port to the complex data struc-
tures showing cloudlet capabilities.
A cloudlet-based system usually contains the following advantages:
• WAN latency: The main advantage of a cloudlet based system is
WAN latency (Verbelen et al., 2012). As a cloudlet contains only
one-hop, the system can use high speed WLAN links without latency
issues.
• Offline computation: Cloudlets are usually deployed on the local
LAN or the one-hop devices nearby. As a result, the system also has a
good performance without web connection.
• Higher bandwidth: A WLAN (Wi-Fi) link between a mobile device
and a system based on cloudlet can provide a higher bandwidth than
wireless Internet links (GPRS) for connecting the cloud.
• Cost effectiveness: It is cost effective that a user does not need to pay
for Internet services due to the one-hop of cloudlets. Moreover,
cloudlets are easily deployed in small organizational entities to en-
sure that cloudlets services can be provided either free of cost or at a
minimal price.
4.3. CloneCloud

4.2. Systems based on cloudlet
Systems based on cloudlet are decentralized Internet infrastructures.
The computing abilities and storage resources of these systems can be
utilized by near mobile devices (Satyanarayanan et al., 2009). The
cloudlet-based system can connect near mobile devices through a
CloneCloud is a MCC offloading framework, which offloads parts of
computation tasks to the infrastructures nearby or cloud (Chun et al.,
2011). The architecture of CloneCloud is shown in Fig. 8. It is important
that synchronization of the smartphone ensures consistent execution.
CloneCloud supports five types of augmented executions (Chun and
Maniatis, 2009): mainline augmentation, hardware augmentation,

Table 1
Comparison of Performance in terms of Context Awareness (CA), Latency, Bandwidth Utilization (BU), Privacy, Complexity and Security.
Framework CA Latency BU Privacy Complexity Security

MAUI (Cuervo et al., 2010) High Low Low Low Low Low
Cloudlet (Satyanarayanan et al., 2009) Low High Medium/High Low Medium Low
CloneCloud (Chun et al., 2011) Medium High/Medium/Low High Low High Low
ThinkAir (Kosta et al., 2012) High Low Low Low High Low
Misco (Dou et al., 2010) Medium Low Low Low Medium Low
Cuckoo (Kemp et al., 2010) Low Medium Low Low Medium Low

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F. Gu et al.
Fig. 7. Architecture of Cloudlet-based System (Satyanarayanan et al., 2009). It consists of a cloudlet host and a mobile client.
primary functionality outsourcing, background augmentation, and
augmented throughput multiplicity. The application partitioning
module combines the static analyzer and the application dynamic
profiler to fulfill execution objectives while ensuring application cor-
rectness constraints. The static analyzer identifies legal partitioning
choices and set of exit and re-integration points for the application
according to the constraints. The dynamic profiler collects the data
required as input for the cost model of computational offloading under
different execution settings.
CloneCloud has the following advantages:
• Backuping recovery of execution data: When a smartphone is not
available, the clone can backup recovery of executing data.
• Augmenting execution: Considering the cost and constraints of off-
loading, CloneCloud can augment execution of the mobile devices
applications on the cloud.
• Supporting fine-grained migration: Compared with traditional
Fig. 8. Architecture of CloneCloud (Chun et al., 2011).
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Journal of Network and Computer Applications 119 (2018) 83–96
suspend migrate-resume mechanisms, CloneCloud can provide fine-
grained thread level migration (Satyanarayanan et al., 2005).
4.4. ThinkAir
ThinkAir is an offloading framework based on Virtual Machines
(VMs), which exploits smartphone virtualization in the cloud and sup-
ports method level computation partitioning and offloading (Kosta
et al., 2012). ThinkAir allocates on-demand resources and exploits
parallelism by dynamically creating, resuming, and destroying VMs in
the cloud when needed. This framework belongs to the scale of software
augmentation techniques (Abolfazli et al., 2014). The architecture of
ThinkAir contains three major components: the execution environment,
profilers, and the application server, as shown in Fig. 9.
On the work node, such as smartphones, there are an execution
controller, an energy model and three profile modules. The execution
controller drives the decision of offloading and records the past
F. Gu et al.
Fig. 9. Architecture of ThinkAir (Kosta et al., 2012). It contains three major
components: the execution environment, profilers, and the application server.
invocation data such as former consuming energy and execution time.
The energy model, inspired by PowerTutor (Kosta et al., 2012), eval-
uates the energy consumption every time running tasks locally and
transports them to the execution controller for offloading decision. The
three profiles (hardware profile, software profile and network profile)
are in charge of collecting the corresponding data and returning the
data to the energy model to evaluate the cost of local running. Hard-
ware profile is responsible for monitoring consuming energy of CPU,
screen and signal interfaces, while software profile collects number of
method calls, CPU time, etc. Networks profile computes network
bandwidth, round trip time, etc.
On the side of cloud, it consists of a client handler, application
servers, program profiles and VMs. The client handler is responsible for
transporting the data with local work nodes and managing the con-
nection from clients. Besides, the client handler distributes the tasks to
the VMs in the cloud according to the conditions of VMs and the re-
quirement of users. The application server is in charge of managing the
offloaded code. Program profiles record the execution data of the VM,
and return the data to the local execution controller to make the off-
loading decision. VMs are the work nodes in the cloud. According to the
type of tasks, VMs can be divided into different types (primary server,
and secondary server) and various conditions (powered-off, paused,
and running). Through this division, different tasks are allocated to
corresponding the VMs specifically.
The main advantages of ThinkAir are as follows:
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Journal of Network and Computer Applications 119 (2018) 83–96
• It takes the energy consumption into account in determining the
offloading portions.
• It allocates resource by demands and uses parallelism to reduce
execution delays.
• Profilers and energy model can be used to determine offloading
decision and estimate energy consumption, respectively.
• The performance does not depend on separate application servers to
distribute computation tasks.
4.5. Misco
Misco is a framework for processing flexibly distributed data, which
uploads computational intensive tasks to the worker nodes such as
smartphones or tablets (Dou et al., 2010). A distinctive feature of this
framework is the direction of offloading, in which mobile devices serve
as the components for processing remote tasks. Misco is designed to
support Python and network connectivity, which consists of a number
of worker nodes and a master server, as shown in Fig. 10.
On the master server side, there are three main components: ap-
plication scheduler, application repository and HTTP server. The ap-
plication scheduler determines the sequence of execution of applica-
tions, and the well-known Earliest Deadline First Scheduler (EDFS) is
adopted. Application repository takes charge of storing the application
input and output data and transmitting the data to the HTTP server. The
HTTP server is regarded as the main method for the communication
between workers and the master server. The server is responsible for
receiving the requests from worker nodes to display the application
status to users and handle intermediary files.
With respect to worker nodes, Misco mainly consists of a requester,
a task repository and a logger. The requester serves as the core com-
ponent of a worker node, which interacts with the HTTP server to re-
quest tasks as well as data, triggers the execution of processor to work
out Map/Reduce tasks and handles upgrade. The task repository stores
any local data needed for the requester. Finally, the logger is used to
maintain the local tasks, and sends them to the master server in com-
pletion of tasks.
When it comes to the advantages of Misco, convenience should be
the first advantage to be mentioned. This framework not only can be
used to handle the application with massive data, but also can achieve
many complicated details for developers, such as automatic paralleli-
zation and load balancing (Dean and Ghemawat, 2008). Besides, the
flexibility of Misco makes it possible to add worker nodes seamlessly.
The disadvantages of Misco are also overt. First, the capability of this
framework is restricted to the computing potential of worker nodes
since most of them are intrinsically limited. Second, the necessity of
annotating the methods as ‘map’ or ‘reduce’ increases the workload.
Third, for the frequent communication between the master server and
worker nodes, overhead causes instability of the bandwidth of network,
executing process, and energy consumption (Shiraz et al., 2013b).
4.6. Cuckoo
Cuckoo (Kemp et al., 2010) is a offloading framework, which up-
loads part of the applications to the cloud or the nearby infrastructure.
The system integrates the existing development tools to make pro-
gramming easy for the developers. Moreover, Cuckoo is implemented
based on Android platform (Android, 2018), which can run locally and
remotely. A typical architecture of the Cuckoo system is shown in
Fig. 11.
In the building configuration of the Cuckoo framework, there are an
Ant (Apach Ant, 2018) building file and two Eclipse builders. The first
builder is the Cuckoo Service Rewriter that rewrites the generated Stub
for each interface of Android Interface Definition Language (AIDL). It
runs before the Java Builder but after the Android Pre Compiler. As a
result, the Cuckoo framework can decide whether a method runs locally
or remotely. The second builder is the Cuckoo Remote Service Deriver.
F. Gu et al. Journal of Network and Computer Applications 119 (2018) 83–96

Fig. 10. Architecture of the Misco system (Dou et al., 2010). It consists of a number of worker nodes and a master server.

Fig. 11. Architecture of the Cuckoo system (Kemp et al., 2010).

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F. Gu et al. Journal of Network and Computer Applications 119 (2018) 83–96

It derives a dummy remote implementation from the available AIDL resource-intensive mobile devices and resource-rich remote server. In a
interface and is implemented by programmers. With the dummy remote peer-to-peer model, each mobile device can utilize the resources of
implementation, the Cuckoo Remote Service Deriver generates an Ant another mobile device nearby. Table 2 shows most of offloading fra-
build file for building a Java archive file (jar). Both Cuckoo Remote meworks adopt client-server model. Partitioning Model (PM) attribute
Service Deriver and the resulting Ant file are running after the Java indicates the type of mobile application with the components or cap-
Builder, but before the Package Builder. abilities modeling. PM includes three models, namely Graph model,
It is excellent for Cuckoo that supports offloading portions of the Linear model, and Hybrid model.
applications to the cloud and application development can be im- Programming Language Support (PLS) attribute shows the pro-
plemented by well-known tools. Although the programming model does gramming language in current offloading frameworks. Most offloading
not forbid a service to maintain the internal state, Cuckoo can realize frameworks support only one programming environment, such as java
arbitrary change from local to remote server or from one remote re- (Giurgiu et al., 2012) or. Net (Cuervo et al., 2010). Programming lan-
source to another without transferring the state. Moreover, this lim- guages in partitioning approaches usually include C++, C# and java
itation is not unacceptable, as developers can transfer the state between (Yang et al., 2012). As shown in Table 3, most offloading frameworks
stateless services by using the architectural style of Representational only support single programming environment. Application Parti-
State Transfer (REST; Fielding and Taylor, 2002). tioning (APA) attribute shows that applications are partitioned with
static or dynamic methods. With the static method, less overhead of
5. Classification of frameworks based on taxonomy mobile devices can be consumed, but with dynamic method, better
partitioning decisions can be achieved. The hybrid method can be used
In Section 4, we have discussed a number of well-established par- to make trade off between the static and dynamic methods. Application
titioning and offloading frameworks. In this section, we classify these Profiler (APR) attribute shows the profiling types of offloading frame-
frameworks in terms of our taxonomy proposed in Section 3. works. The profiling mechanism is used to measure the memory or the
time complexity of an application. Optimization Model (OM) attribute
5.1. Comparison of offloading frameworks shows the method for lowering the communicational or computational
cost. There are three different types of optimization model: task based
As shown in Section 4, a number of frameworks have considered all optimization technique, network optimization technique, and offload
parameters, including Enabling Technique (ET), Offload Infrastructure decision technique. Table 3 shows that most offloading frameworks
(OI), Augmentation Model (AM), Communication Model (CM), Parti- adopt task based optimization technique to lower the computational
tioning Model (PM), Programming Language Support (PLS), Applica- and communicational cost. Allocation Decision (AD) attribute indicates
tion PArtitioning (APA), Application PRofiler (APR), Optimization that the components should be running locally or remotely. The online
Model (OM), Allocation Decision (AD) and Granularity (G). Tables 2 AD performs a better performance than the offline AD. However, the
and 3 present the comparison of application frameworks (presented in online AD incurs much more computational overhead than the offline
Section 4) according to the taxonomy mentioned in Section 3. Not AD. The hybrid AD trades off the online AD and the offline AD. Gran-
Applicable (N/A) in Tables 2 and 3 means that the offloading frame- ularity (G) attribute indicates the partitioning granularity level. The
works does not implement the corresponding attribute. granularity level can affect the complexity of distributed application
processing and the overhead of resources utilization in component
migration at the runtime (Shiraz et al., 2013a). The refined level
5.2. Analysis of classification results
granularity requires a highly intensive monitoring and synchronization
mechanism during running (Cuervo et al., 2010).
Enabling Technique (ET) attribute shows the enabling technique of
partitioning, including system virtualization, application virtualization
6. Offloading decisions and schemes
and native process code migration. Table 2 shows that most offloading
systems adopt application virtualization. Offload Infrastructure (OI)
In this section, we present two purposes of offloading and some
attribute indicates the offloading infrastructure enabling MCC frame-
applications to demonstrate the benefits of offloading in various do-
works, which can be cloud, cloudlet, or mobile ad-hoc. It can be seen
mains.
from Table 2 that most offloading infrastructures are cloud. Augmen-
tation Model (AM) attribute denotes the service model, which can be
6.1. Offloading decision
used to augment the mobile client to cloud services. There are three
different types of services model: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Communication
As offloading frameworks need to partition computation tasks to a
Model (CM) attribute indicates the communication model between
remote server, it should make a decision to determine whether and
mobile devices and cloud entities. The client-server is generally used for
what part of the application to be uploaded to the server for offloading.
A number of studies have focused on offloading decisions for improving
Table 2
performance and saving energy (Giurgiu et al., 2012; Niu et al., 2014).
Classification of Offloading Frameworks based on ET, OU, AM, CM and PM.
In this section, we present two objectives of offloading decisions.
Framework ET OI AM CM PM To Improve Performance. To improve the computational effi-
ciency of mobile devices, partitioning and offloading have attracted
MAUI (Cuervo et al., Application Cloud PaaS Client Hybrid
2010) Virtualization Server significant attention of researchers (Balan et al., 2007). In many com-
Cloudlet System Cloudlet IaaS Peer to Graph putational scenarios, offloading can enhance the running speed of
(Satyanarayanan Virtualization Peer mobile devices. The offloading conditions for improving computation
et al., 2009)
performance can be formulated as follows. We can partition a program
CloneCloud (Chun et al., Application Cloud PaaS Client Hybrid
2011) Virtualization Server into two parts: one part is running locally and the other part is off-
ThinkAir (Kosta et al., System Cloud IaaS Client Hybrid loaded to a cloud server. Some operations with special equipment, such
2012) Virtualization Server as camera, accelerometer, etc. should be running locally. Suppose Sm is
Misco (Dou et al., 2010) Application Cloud SaaS Client Graph the computation speed of the mobile device, w is the amount of com-
Virtualization Server
putation that needs to be uploaded to the server. We regard the time of
Cuckoo (Kemp et al., Application N/A IaaS Client Linear
2010) Virtualization Server executing the uploaded tasks locally as w/Sm. We suppose sending the
input data di requires di/B m seconds with the bandwidth of B. The

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F. Gu et al. Journal of Network and Computer Applications 119 (2018) 83–96

Table 3
Classification of Offloading Frameworks based on PLS, APA, APR, OM, AD and G.
Framework PLS APA APR OM AD G

MAUI (Cuervo et al., 2010) Signal Dynamic Network Task based Online Method
Cloudlet (Satyanarayanan et al., 2009) Multiple Hybrid N/A Network based Offline Component
CloneCloud (Chun et al., 2011) Universal Hybrid Software Offload decision based N/A Thread
ThinkAir (Kosta et al., 2012) Signal Static Network Task based Online Task
Misco (Dou et al., 2010) Universal Dynamic Software Task based Online Task/Object
Cuckoo (Kemp et al., 2010) Multiple Dynamic N/A Offload decision based N/A Module

time for network connection and the size of the program are negligible
(Cuervo et al., 2010). Assume Ss is the processing speed of the server.
The time of offloading and executing the uploaded task is di/B + w/Ss.
While di/B + w/Ss < w/Sm, partitioning and offloading can improve
the computational performance.
To Save Energy. As the resources of mobile devices is limited, how
to save energy should also be taken into consideration. With the de-
velopment of mobile devices, the battery life are facing great chal-
lenges. Although some improvements have been made in battery
technology, there is still a gap between rapid growth of power con-
sumption and power capacities of current mobile devices. As a result,
offloading can extend the battery life of mobile devices effectively. The
intensive computation tasks can be uploaded to servers for running
(Terefe et al., 2016). The offloading condition for saving energy can be
formulated as follows. Suppose pm is the power of the mobile system.
The energy for performing tasks is pm × w/Sm. Assume pc is the power
consumption for sending data to the network. Moreover, the system
also needs to wait for the result of offloading, which consumes the
power of pi. While pm × w/Sm > pc × di/B + pi × w/Ss, partitioning
and offloading can save energy.
6.2. Offloading schemes
techniques for application computation and discuss the future trends of
partitioning and offloading.
7.1. Partitioning and offloading
Partitioning and offloading is an application layer solution which
can alleviate the pressure of mobile devices (Singh and Andrews, 2014;
Ou et al., 2007). It divides computation tasks into two parts: one part
runs locally, and the other one runs remotely.
7.1.1. Partitioning
The offloading framework requires the computation task to be
partitioned into client and server portions for running locally and on
remote server, respectively. The granularity of application partitioning
is important in designing the optimal partitioning algorithm, which
affects computation complexity and the overhead of resource utilization
at the running time. However, the partitioning procedure is an NP-
complete problem (Cameron et al., 2007). As a result, different heur-
istics have proposed to solve this problem (Khan, 2015). Different
partitioning granularity levels have influences on many issues, such as
compatibility, class uploading, state transfer, object identity, and per-
formance overhead.

It has been shown that offloading can benefit for many domains. 7.1.2. Offloading
Many researchers implemented offloading schemes with different fra- Latency of accessing the cloud is one of major factors that affect the
meworks. A large part of researches have focused on the domains of offloading performance. Currently large data center is the main form of
mathematics (Wang and Li, 2004; Ou et al., 2006; Rim et al., 2006) and cloud computing resources. Data centers with large computing and
image processing (Chen et al., 2004; Gu et al., 2003; Balan et al., 2007). storage resources use Internet to connect mobile devices. Thus, how to
The schemes based on games (Li et al., 2001; Chu et al., 2004; Cuervo manage latency expectations is usually challenging. What's more, some
et al., 2010) and multimedia (Wang and Li, 2004; Li et al., 2001; Ou intensive-computation applications are sensitive to the latency. The
et al., 2006) are also investigated, and the number of these schemes architecture of the cloud system plays an important role in solving the
continues to grow together with the improvement of wireless tech- latency of communication. Utilizing varieties of computing resources
nology. The schemes related to artificial intelligence (Chen et al., 2004; depending on their availability remains a major challenge.
Tilevich and Smaragdakis, 2002; Cuervo et al., 2010) are also being
offloaded as they need complex computations. As shown in Table 4, we 7.2. Challenges of partitioning and offloading
list some offloading applications that have been improved by different
offloading solutions. 7.2.1. Seamless connectivity and consist distributed platform
Due to mobility of mobile devices, there are many obstacles af-
7. Challenges and future work fecting the connection between mobile devices and servers (Chuang
et al., 2013). Providing seamless connectivity is an important research
In this section, we highlight the challenges of partitioning and off- issue for MCC. Distributed application model provides variable accesses
loading. To explore domains for future research, we explore lightweight to cloud resources and services. However, it is not easy to ensure the
transparency of the environment and sustain consistency of uploaded
Table 4 components of the application (Ahmed et al., 2015c).
A list of applications that have been optimized using offloading.
Application Offloading Solution 7.2.2. High software quality
For the sake of energy saving and performance improvement, cur-
Face recognition MAUI (Cuervo et al., 2010; Li et al., 2015)
rent offloading frameworks partition and upload intensive components
Image search CloneCloud (Chun et al., 2011)
Virus-scanning CloneCloud (Chun et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2011) of a mobile application from local devices to the server. These frame-
Speech recognition Cloudlet (Satyanarayanan et al., 2009) works focus on how to partition the computation tasks on mobile de-
Indoor map reconstruction Cloudlet (Chen et al., 2015) vices and when to upload these computation tasks to remote server
Text editor Misco (Dou et al., 2010) (Giurgiu et al., 2012). However, most of them do not take into con-
Chess game ThinkAir (Kosta et al., 2012)
sideration the bandwidth and latency of the network, sudden increase
Video encoding ThinkAir (Lee et al., 2015)
Object recognition Cuckoo (Kosta et al., 2012) of the CPU load on mobile devices, and variations of users inputs during
interactions. Running the application is affected by the quality of

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F. Gu et al.
network, which may result in a poor performance. Moreover, the cloud
server also needs to process some unpredictable overheads and changes
from variable mobile devices. Further, different cloud computing ser-
vices have different abilities to handle I/O operation, CPU power con-
sumption, and network latency (Smit et al., 2012). Hence, ensuring the
high quality of software is very important to optimize partitioning
frameworks and to improve users' experience.
7.2.3. Security and privacy
During the procedure of offloading to the cloud, the security of data
and privacy of users should be taken into consideration. The uploaded
partial of applications should be executed in an isolated and trust-
worthy environment to protect the privacy (Sanaei et al., 2014). Se-
curity in the offloading framework is important from three different
perspectives: security for smart mobile devices, security for data
transmission and security in the cloud server nodes. Therefore, ensuring
privacy of data and security of the procedure should be paid more at-
tentions. A trustworthy partitioning and offloading framework is highly
expected to ensure trustworthiness of the remote computing environ-
ment.
7.3. Future work
Due to the constraint of resources, the applications running on the
device should be partitioned into several components. Although re-
searchers have been studying the method for partitioning and the
constraints of the strategy (Abolfazli et al., 2014), future research
should consider partitioning and offloading in terms of lightness,
adaptability, and context-awareness (Liu et al., 2015). The partitioning
and offloading frameworks should consider the following aspects:
• The dependency across different components needs to be mini-
mized.
• The impact of network bandwidth also needs to be minimized. As
the network situation maybe unstable, the frameworks should adapt
to the bandwidth and fluctuation of network.
• The framework should support fault tolerance, due to unpredictable
network situation and application changes. Dynamic partitioning
and offloading may cause fault, such as data loss and corruption.
The system must ensure normal operation with mistakes.
• The runtime cost and energy consumption should be minimized. In
order to improve the efficiency of offloading, the runtime cost and
energy consumption should be taken into consideration.
• To reduce computation and communication overhead, the frame-
work should be a lightweight framework.
8. Conclusion
This paper surveys the enabling techniques and different resources
used for partitioning and offloading. Based on the analysis of MCC, we
propose a taxonomy of current offloading standards and classify some
famous offloading frameworks. Moreover, we compare these frame-
works based on our taxonomy and present offloading applications. We
also discuss the open research issues and challenges for future study on
partitioning and offloading.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (61572060, 61772060), the Academic Excellence
Foundation of BUAA for PhD Students, and CERNET Innovation Project
(NGII20160316, NGII20170315).
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Jianwei Niu received his Ph.D. degrees in 2002 in com-
puter science from Beihang University. He was a visiting
scholar at School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
University, USA from Jan. 2010 to Feb. 2011. He is a pro-
fessor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering,
Beihang University. He is now an IEEE senior member. He
received the New Century Excellent Researcher Award from
Ministry of Education of China 2009, the first prize of
technical invention of the Ministry of Education of China
2012. His current research interests include mobile and
pervasive computing, mobile video analysis.
Zhiping Qi is a master student in school of computer sci-
ence and technology, Beihang University. He received BS of
computer science from Beihang University in 2015. His
research focuses on sensor network.
Mohammed Atiquzzaman received the MS and PhD de-
grees in electrical engineering and electronics from the
University of Manchester, United Kingdom. He currently
holds the Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential professorship
in the School of Computer Science at the University of
Oklahoma. He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Networks
and Computer Applications, founding editor-in-chief of
Vehicular Communications and has served/serving on the
editorial boards of various IEEE journals and co-chaired
numerous IEEE international conferences including IEEE
Globecom. His research interests are in communications
switching, transport protocols, wireless and mobile net-
works, satellite networks, and optical communications. He
is a senior member of the IEEE.

Fei Gu is a Ph.D Candidate in school of computer science

and technology, Beihang University. He received MS degree
of computer science and technology from Nanjing
University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2014 and BS
of software engineering from Yangzhou University in 2011.
His research focuses on sensor network, healthcare system,
data mining and so on.

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