CWC: A Distributed Computing Infrastructure Using Smartphones

Abstract

Every night, many smartphones are plugged into a power source for recharging the battery. Given the increasing computing capabilities of smartphones, these idle phones constitute a sizeable computing infrastructure. Therefore, for an enterprise which supplies its employees with smartphones, we argue that a computing infrastructure that leverages idle smartphones being charged overnight is an energy-efficient and cost-effective alternative to running certain tasks on traditional servers. While parallel execution models and schedulers exist for servers, smartphones face a unique set of technical challenges due to the heterogeneity in CPU clock speed, variability in network bandwidth, and lower availability than servers. In this paper, we address many of these challenges to develop CWC—a distributed computing infrastructure using smartphones. We implement and evaluate a prototype of CWC that employs a novel scheduling algorithm to minimize the makespan of a set of computing tasks. Our evaluations using a testbed of $18$ Android phones show that CWC’s scheduler yields a makespan that is 1.6x faster than other simpler approaches.