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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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Programming support for sharing resources across heterogeneous mobile devices
Modern mobile users commonly use multiple heterogeneous mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, and wearables. Enabling these devices to seamlessly share their computational, network, and sensing resources has great potential benefit. Sharing resources across collocated mobile devices creates mobile device clouds (MDCs), commonly used to optimize application performance and to enable novel applications. However, enabling heterogeneous mobile devices to share their resources presents a number of difficulties, including the need to coordinate and steer the execution of devices with dissimilar network interfaces, application programming models, and system architectures. In this paper, we describe a solution that systematically empowers heterogeneous mobile devices to seamlessly, reliably, and efficiently share their resources. We present a programming model and runtime support for heterogeneous mobile device-to-device resource sharing. Our solution comprises a declarative domain-specific language for device-to-device cooperation, supported by a powerful runtime infrastructure. we evaluated our solution by conducting a controlled user study and running performance/energy efficiency benchmarks. The evaluation results indicate that our solution can become a practical tool for enhancing the capabilities of modern mobile applications by leveraging the resources of nearby mobile devices.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1717065
- PAR ID:
- 10096815
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 105 to 116
- 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/10.1145/3197231.3197250
