Recent Developments and Programming Models of Mobile Device-to-Device Computation Offloading

The method of choice in today’s world to relieve resource constrained mobile devices of computational tasks is to delegate them to the cloud. This notion is known as Mobile Cloud Computing. Rising number of mobile devices and cloud services may call for a change in this direction as the transported data volumes exceed network limitations and hinder the applications dependent on it. In addition to Mobile Edge and Fog Computing, an overlooked candidate for handling our computation requirements could be other mobile devices in the area which are underutilized. Although a seemingly great solution for bringing cloud-like services even closer to the end-user, research in this topic has been ongoing ever since smart-phones became commonplace and has identified a multitude of accompanying issues yet to be solved. This report outlines one area of concern for the future of such a computation offloading model – the frameworks and programming models that would be compatible with it. Secondly, it gives an overview of recent efforts made towards solving the issues and speculating what it takes to reach a real implementation.