Abstract: Smartphones have become a part of our daily life. Smartphone users expect PC like functionalities over their phones. Making such vision is possible by offloading computationally intensive tasks from resource constrained smartphone to powerful cloud infrastructure. Much architecture like Cloudlet, Virtual Smartphone over IP (VSIP), CloneCloud, etc. are present in the literature, which uses the cloud based Virtual Machines (VMs) for computation offloading. However, such approaches require more time during startup and have high virtualization overhead, which results in increase in execution time of application. Also, VM based deployment requires more amount of disk space at cloud side. Container is latest, OS-level virtualization technique used in cloud environments for application deployments. Containers give better performance in terms of startup speed and size as compared to VMs. In the proposed system, we have used container based lightweight Docker technology for computation offloading over cloud. Our evaluation shows that, Docker based solution takes less amount of time during startup which in turn reduces response time to user. Also Docker based solution requires less amount of disk space for application deployment as compared to VM based approach, which in turn saves storage resources over cloud.
Keywords: Cloud computing, Container, Computation offloading, Virtualization, Smartphones, Docker.