ECOS: Practical Mobile Application Offloading for Enterprises

Offloading has emerged as a promising idea to allow handheld devices to access intensive applications without performance or energy costs. This could be particularly useful for enterprises seeking to run line-of-business applications on handhelds. However, we must address two practical roadblocks in order to make offloading amenable for enterprises: (i) ensuring data privacy and the use of trusted offloading resources, and (ii) accommodating offload at scale with diverse handheld objectives and compute resource capabilities. We present the design and implementation of an Enterprise-Centric Offloading System (ECOS) which augments prior offloading proposals to address these issues. ECOS uses a logically central controller to opportunistically leverage diverse compute resources, while tightly controlling where specific applications offload depending on privacy, performance, and energy constraints of users and applications. A wide range of experiments using a real prototype establish the effectiveness of our approach.