CollaboRoid: Mobile platform support for collaborative applications

Abstract

Development of mobile collaborative applications requires non-trivial amounts of efforts in enabling multi-device resource sharing. The current practice of mobile collaborative application development remains largely at the application level. In this paper, we present CollaboRoid, a platform-level solution that provides a set of system services in the Android stack. It abstracts the sharing of not only hardware resources, but also software resources and multimedia contents between multiple mobile devices. We demonstrate the efficacy of CollaboRoid first with an example mobile collaborative application developed using CollaboRoid followed by extensive experiments with several collaboration scenarios on Nexus 5 and 7 devices. Our experimental results confirm that (1)the latency of remote resource access remains sufficiently low for collaboration, and (2)the additional energy consumption for collaboration is insignificant considering the benefit of energy sharing effect.