Abstract

Smartphones suffer from limited computational capabilities and battery life. 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 have 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 and reduces energy

consumption. Our approach yields speedups in real world applications of 24x and 6x over WiFi

and 3G respectively.