Authors:
Abdelmounaam Rezgui
1
and
Zaki Malik
2
Affiliations:
1
New Mexico Tech, United States
;
2
Wayne State University, United States
Keyword(s):
Mobile Cloud Gaming, Visualization as a Service, GPUs, Offloading.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Cloud Computing
;
Cloud Computing Enabling Technology
;
Cloud Cost Analysis
;
Engineering Mobile Clouds and Mobile-based Systems
;
Fundamentals
;
Mobile Cloud Computing and Services
;
Mobile Cloud Computing Models, Infrastructures, and Approaches
;
Mobile Multimedia Content Delivery, Transferring, and Migration
;
QoS for Applications on Clouds
;
Services Science
;
Xaas
Abstract:
In recent years, significant progress has been made to improve the power efficiency of mobile devices. In
particular, new GPU architectures have made it possible to run compute-intensive applications directly on
battery-powered mobile devices. In parallel, research is also being conducted in the area of application offloading,
the process of running compute-intensive tasks on cloud servers and delivering the results of these
computations to mobile devices through their wireless interfaces. It is important to understand the power consumption
implications of each of these two options. In this paper, we use mobile cloud gaming as an example
to evaluate and compare these two alternatives (running games on the cloud or on mobile devices.) Based on
this comparison, we introduce the concept of Visualization as a Service (VaaS) as a new model to design and
implement graphics-intensive applications for mobile devices. In this model, advanced visualization capabilities
(e. g., interactive visu
alization of high resolution videos/images) would be provided to mobile users as a
service via the Internet. We show through actual hardware specifications that, despite the recent introduction
of ultra low power GPUs for mobile devices, it remains far more power efficient to offload graphics-intensive
tasks to the cloud. The associated latency can still be tolerated in most applications.
(More)