  The conventional designs of mobile computation offloading fetch user-specific
data to the cloud prior to computing, called offline prefetching. However, this
approach can potentially result in excessive fetching of large volumes of data
and cause heavy loads on radio-access networks. To solve this problem, the
novel technique of live prefetching is proposed in this paper that seamlessly
integrates the task-level computation prediction and prefetching within the
cloud-computing process of a large program with numerous tasks. The technique
avoids excessive fetching but retains the feature of leveraging prediction to
reduce the program runtime and mobile transmission energy. By modeling the
tasks in an offloaded program as a stochastic sequence, stochastic optimization
is applied to design fetching policies to minimize mobile energy consumption
under a deadline constraint. The policies enable real-time control of the
prefetched-data sizes of candidates for future tasks. For slow fading, the
optimal policy is derived and shown to have a threshold-based structure,
selecting candidate tasks for prefetching and controlling their prefetched data
based on their likelihoods. The result is extended to design close-to-optimal
prefetching policies to fast fading channels. Compared with fetching without
prediction, live prefetching is shown theoretically to always achieve reduction
on mobile energy consumption.
