Circa: Offloading collaboratively in the same vicinity with iBeacons

Abstract

Code offloading to remote infrastructures has been a common practice for mobile users who seek extra power or computing resources to perform computation-intensive tasks. Existing works, however, have so far mainly focused on code offloading from a single mobile device to remote cloud servers, which restricts the potential of code offloading only to devices with available Internet access. In this paper, we propose Circa, a new framework that demonstrates the feasibility of code offloading among multiple mobile devices in close proximity to one another, leveraging the presence of iBeacons. Our objective is to eliminate the costs incurred by running virtual machine instances in the cloud, and the need to connect remotely to the cloud as well. With the assistance of iBeacons, devices in the same vicinity can discover and support one another through collaborative code offloading with short-range communication, obviating the need for centralized servers. We have implemented Circa on the iOS platform and validated its feasibility using iOS devices. According to our experimental results, with more than two collaborators, Circa is capable of reducing the total execution time of an offloaded task substantially, while preserving satisfactory performance of the mobile application.