  The increasing complexity of smartphone applications and services necessitate
high battery consumption but the growth of smartphones' battery capacity is not
keeping pace with these increasing power demands. To overcome this problem,
researchers gave birth to the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) research area. In
this paper we advance on previous ideas, by proposing and implementing the
first known Near Field Communication (NFC)-based computation offloading
framework. This research is motivated by the advantages of NFC's short distance
communication, with its better security, and its low battery consumption. We
design a new NFC communication protocol that overcomes the limitations of the
default protocol; removing the need for constant user interaction, the one-way
communication restraint, and the limit on low data size transfer. We present
experimental results of the energy consumption and the time duration of two
computationally intensive representative applications: (i) RSA key generation
and encryption, and (ii) gaming/puzzles. We show that when the helper device is
more powerful than the device offloading the computations, the execution time
of the tasks is reduced. Finally, we show that devices that offload application
parts considerably reduce their energy consumption due to the low-power NFC
interface and the benefits of offloading.
