Offloading tasks to cloud is one of the proposed solutions for extending battery life of mobile devices. Most prior research focuses on offloading computation, leaving communicationrelated tasks out of scope. However, most popular applications today involve intensive communication that consumes a significant part of the overall energy. Hence, we currently do not know how feasible it is to use offloading for saving energy in such apps. In this paper, we first show that it is possible to save energy by offloading communication-related tasks of the app to the cloud. We use an open source Twitter client, AndTweet, as a case study. However, using a set of popular open source applications, we also show that existing apps contain constraints that have to be released with code modifications before offloading can be profitable, and that the potential energy savings depend on many communication parameters. We therefore develop two tools: the first to identify the constraints and the other for fine-grained communication energy estimation. We exemplify the tools and explain how they could be used to help offloading parts of popular apps successfully.

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Offloading computation to cloud has been widely used for extending battery life of mobile devices. However, little effort has been invested in applying the offloading techniques to communication-related tasks. We propose SmartDiet, a toolkit to identify the constraints that reduce offloading opportunities and to calculate the energy-saving potential of offloading communication-related tasks. SmartDiet traces the method-level application execution and estimates the allocation of communication energy cost from traffic traces. We discuss key features of SmartDiet and show some preliminary results using a prototype implementation.