Utilizing nearby computing resources for resource-limited mobile devices

For the last decade, mobile devices have been significantly developed with powerful hardware facilities. Nevertheless, rapid growth in application functionality requires ever greater hardware capability. Thus ensuring the quality of service in resources-limited execution environments remains a major challenge of mobile software development. To reduce execution time and save battery power, some functionality of mobile applications is often executed remotely. However, such an optimization mechanism (i.e., computational offloading) has received attention only in the research literature. In this paper, we present a novel distribution infrastructure that can execute any functionality at either a powerful remote server or nearby mobile devices using two distributed execution models|client/server and peer to peer. Our evaluation results demonstrate that the presented approach can increase both performance and energy efficiency of mobile applications by virtually expanding the hardware capacity of an existing mobile device.