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Circa: collaborative code offloading among multiple mobile devices

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Abstract

For mobile users who seek extra power or computing resources to perform computation-intensive tasks, code offloading to remote infrastructures is a promising solution. However, most of the recent works mainly target on code offloading from single mobile devices to remote cloud servers, which restricts the potential of offloading only to devices with available Internet access. Moreover, offloading to remote cloud computing platforms is not always guaranteed to be time efficient and energy conserving. In this paper, we propose Circa, a framework that demonstrates the feasibility of code offloading among multiple mobile devices in the same vicinity, leveraging the presence of iBeacons. Circa eliminates the costs incurred by connecting to a remote cloud and running virtual machine instances in the cloud. With iBeacons, neighbouring devices can discover and support one another through collaborative code offloading with short-range communication, obviating the need for centralized servers . We also propose task allocation algorithms to select reliable collaborators among nearby mobile devices and disseminate the computation intensive tasks among them efficiently in a fair fashion. The performance of the task allocation algorithm is evaluated based on three different mobility models. We also implement a prototype of the Circa framework on an iOS platform and validate its feasibility and efficiency using iOS devices . According to the experimental results, by involving nearby mobile devices as collaborators, Circa is able to reduce the total execution time of an offloaded task substantially, while preserving the satisfactory performance of mobile applications .

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part by RGC GRF Grants under the contracts 16211715 and 16206417, and an RGC CRF Grant under the contract C7036-15G.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

    Xueling Lin, Jingjie Jiang & Bo Li

  2. Future Network Theory Lab, Huawei Technologies, Hong Kong, China

    Jingjie Jiang

  3. Department of Computer Science, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA

    Calvin Hong Yi Li

  4. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

    Baochun Li

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Correspondence to Xueling Lin.

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Lin, X., Jiang, J., Li, C.H.Y. et al. Circa: collaborative code offloading among multiple mobile devices. Wireless Netw 26, 823–841 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-018-1824-y

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