Comparative Analysis of Network Libraries for Offloading Efficiency in Mobile Cloud Environment

In the modern era, smartphones are increasingly becoming an integral and essential part of our daily life. Although the hardware capabilities of the smartphones (i.e., processing, memory, battery, and communication) are improving every day, however, it is not enough to handle computation-intensive applications, such as image processing, data analytics, and encryption. To overcome these limitations, mobile cloud computing (MCC) is introduced, which augments the capabilities of smartphones and resources of the cloud to provide better QoS performance to the user. The idea is to save resources in the smartphones by offloading the computationally intensive tasks to the cloud. In this context, researchers have proposed several offloading frameworks, mainly addressing challenges of why-what-when and where to offload. In this paper, however, we explore another challenging issue of offloading, i.e., how-to-offload. More specifically, we analyze different networking libraries (HttpURLConnection, OkHttp, Volley, Retrofit) and study their performance on various dynamic factors such as data size, communication media, hardware and software of the smartphone. Our objective is to explore if an application can use the same networking library for all the smartphones and all purposes or there is a need to make an adaptive decision based on the local constraints. To understand this, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the networking libraries on different Andriod smart-phones in the real environment and found that there is a need of adaptive network library selection because libraries perform changes in different scenarios.