Harnessing Spectrum Awareness to Enhance Mobile Computing

The well documented growth in mobile traffic is mainly driven by increasingly sophisticated smart phone applications. Simultaneously, user preference for lighter phones has resulted in more battery power constrained hand-helds that offload computations to resource intensive cloud. This second trend exacerbates the bandwidth crunch often experienced over wireless networks. Our idea (joint cognitive offloading and scheduling) is to use dynamic spectrum access and management concepts from wireless networking to effect computation offloading and scheduling solutions that achieves near optimal trade-offs between the mobile device and wireless resources. We use all radio available interfaces (e.g. WiFi, LTE) in multi-RAT enabled devices to schedule appropriate components of the application to run either on the mobile device or on the resource-rich cloud, while staying adaptive to the conditions of the wireless network.