Offloading for mobile devices is an increasingly popular research topic, matching the popu-larity mobile devices have in the general population. Studying mobile offloading is challenging because of device and application heterogeneity. However, we believe that focusing on a specific type of application can bring advances in offloading for mobile devices, while still keeping a wide range of applicability. In this paper we focus on loop-based applications, in which most of the functionality is given by iterating an execution loop. We model the main loop of the application with a graph that consists of a cycle and propose an operational analysis to study offloading on this model. We also propose a testbed based on a real-world application to empirically evaluate offloading. We conduct performance evaluation using both tools and compare the analytical and empirical results.