Distributed execution for resource-constrained mobile consumer devices

Abstract

Mobile consumer devices take increasingly important roles, more closely and personally interacting with users. As users get used to mobile devices, they often want the same level of computing experience as they can have from desktop PCs, but still in small and light form factors. Considering current technology, we find the limitations of the processor and the memory are still too big in current mobile devices to satisfy demanding mobile users. To alleviate resource limitations, many researchers explored techniques to share the resources of powerful surrogate servers nearby. In that line of research, we propose slim execution for an effective mobile computing paradigm. To experimentally verify our execution model, we develop a code transforming tool, distributed execution transformer (DiET). The DiET takes original Java bytecode and replaces the bodies of heavy methods with remote procedure calls to surrogate servers. Since the modified bytecode is still a legal Java bytecode, mobile devices can download and run the modified bytecode on standard JVMs, cooperating with surrogate servers. Our experiments with the SciMark 2.0 show our distributed execution scheme reduces the execution time by up to 71%.