SAMD: Fine-Grained Application Sharing for Mobile Collaboration

Abstract

The collective use of ever connected and pervasive mobile devices has been increasingly sought for in mobile collaboration, such as multiplayer mobile gaming and distributed processing. The current model of mobile collaboration requires each device to install a particular, `full' mobile app for a respective collaboration. Besides, collaboration functionalities are typically implemented at application level. In this paper, we present Single Application Multiple Device (SAMD) as a platform-level mobile collaboration framework. A mobile app developed using SAMD is capable of fine-grained application sharing. In particular, SAMD enables devices, agreed to participate in collaboration, to get portions of the app on-the-fly and run them without the prior installation. To achieve this, we have developed three solutions as core functionalities of SAMD: 1) Controller packaging, 2) lookahead transfer and 3) code adaptation. We have implemented SAMD on Android as a proof-of-concept prototype. Our experimental results demonstrate SAMD can provide fine-grained sharing of latency-insensitive applications.