Modern mobile devices feature ever increasing computational, sensory, and network resources, which can be shared to execute tasks on behalf of nearby devices. Mobile device clouds (MDCs) facilitate such distributed execution by exposing the collective resources of a set of nearby mobile devices through a unified programming interface. However, the true potential of MDCs remains untapped, as they fail to provide practical programming support for developers to execute distributed functionalities. To address this problem, we introduce a microservice-based Programmable MDC architecture (PMDC), highly customized for the unique features of MDC environments. PMDC conveniently provisions functionalities as microservices, which are deployed on MDC devices on demand. PMDC features a novel domain specific language that provides abstractions for concisely expressing fine-grained control over the procedures of device capability sharing and microservice execution. Furthermore, PMDC introduces a new system component-the microservice gateway, which reconciles the supply of available device capabilities and the demand for microservice execution to distribute microservices within an MDC. Our evaluation shows that MDCs, expressed by developers through the PMDC declarative programming interface, exhibit low energy consumption and high performance.
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Intent to share: enhancing Android inter-component communication for distributed devices
Data-intensive applications in diverse domains, including video streaming, gaming, and health monitoring, increasingly require that mobile devices directly share data with each other. However, developing distributed data sharing functionality introduces low-level, brittle, and hard-to-maintain code into the mobile codebase. To reconcile the goals of programming convenience and performance efficiency, we present a novel middleware framework that enhances the Android platform's component model to support seamless and efficient inter-device data sharing. Our framework provides a familiar programming interface that extends the ubiquitous Android Inter-Component Communication (ICC), thus lowering the learning curve. Unlike middleware platforms based on the RPC paradigm, our programming abstractions require that mobile application developers think through and express explicitly data transmission patterns, thus treating latency as a first-class design concern. Our performance evaluation shows that using our framework incurs little performance overhead, comparable to that of custom-built implementations. By providing reusable programming abstractions that preserve component encapsulation, our framework enables Android devices to efficiently share data at the component level, providing powerful building blocks for the development of emerging distributed mobile applications.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1717065
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10096812
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 94 to 104
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3197231.3197245
