Mobile collaborative computing on the fly

Abstract

Today's mobile devices are increasingly capable with a rich set of resources, such as octacore processors, large amount of memory, GPS modules and even GPUs. Harnessing these devices for collaborative use is of great practical importance. At present, they are either collectively used or statically collaborated. In this paper, we present Single Application Multiple Device (SAMD) as a novel framework that provides collaboration functionalities at mobile platform level. A mobile app developed using SAMD is capable of mobile collaboration by sending portions of the app on-the-fly and running them without the prior installation. SAMD consists of three core functionalities: (1) Controller packaging, (2) lookahead transfer and (3) Controller replacement. We have implemented SAMD on Android as a proof-of-concept prototype. We evaluated SAMD using five applications on a number of real heterogeneous mobile devices. Our experimental results demonstrate SAMD can provide fine-grained sharing of latency-insensitive applications.