A Multi-Objective Approach to Real-Time In-Situ Processing of Mobile-Application Workflows

Abstract

Innovative mobile applications that rely on real-time in-situ processing of data collected in the field <i>need </i> to tap into the heterogeneous sensing and computing capabilities of sensor nodes, mobile handhelds as well as computing and storage servers in remote datacenters. There is, however, <i>uncertainty</i> associated with the <i>quality</i> and <i>quantity</i> of data from mobile sensors as well as with the <i> availability</i> and <i>capabilities</i> of mobile computing resources on the field. Data and computing-resource uncertainty, if unchecked, may propagate up the “raw data <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\rightarrow$</tex-math></inline-formula> information <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\rightarrow$</tex-math></inline-formula> knowledge” chain and have an adverse effect on the relevance of the generated results. A generalized workflow representation scheme that can represent a wide variety of data- and task-parallel ubiquitous mobile applications is presented. A unified uncertainty-aware framework for data and computing-resource management to enable real-time, in-situ processing of applications is proposed and evaluated. The framework employs a two-phase solution that captures the propagation of data uncertainty up the data-processing chain using interval arithmetic in the first phase and that employs multi-objective optimization for task allocation in the second phase. The results of a case study to assess effectiveness the proposed framework are discussed in detail. Results reaffirm that i) data-uncertainty awareness helps control the uncertainty in the final result and ii) multi-objective combinatorial approach for task allocation significantly outperforms the single-objective approaches in terms of makespan (15 percent improvement), fairness in battery drain (56 percent improvement), and network load (54 percent improvement).