A Webpage Offloading Framework for Smart Devices

Smart devices such as mobile phones and smart TVs are widely used for enriching our daily activities. Although their power source and processing speed are limited, it is necessary for these devices to provide certain computation power. To enhance computation capability on smart devices, offloading is proposed as one of the effective approaches. However, it requires extra efforts for developers to implement the offloading mechanism for each application. HTML5 standard provides a feature called Web Worker which allows web pages to spawn separate threads as workers. Since each worker holds individual execution environments and contexts, it is appropriate for offloading without complex partition. In this paper, we present a generic offloading framework for JavaScript Web Worker named Web Worker Offloading Framework (WWOF). This framework can offload the workers from browsers to the cloud easily and seamlessly. The Web Worker runs on an offloading server instead of on the browser, and exchanges data with clients via WebSocket. To prove the feasibility of this framework, we evaluated several benchmarks on different platforms including PCs, tablets, mobile phones and smart TVs. It is verified that this framework is able to suppress the devices’ power consumption and to increase the execution speed, while running a heavy workload.