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.

Device Analyzer: Understanding Smartphone Usage

“…Overnight charges A recent study investigating of battery charges of 15 participants over 3 weeks [2] reported that charges during the day and over night vary dramatically in length, with charges between 10pm and 5am having a median duration of 7 hours while other charges had a median duration of 30 minutes. Our dataset supports their findings, with a median AC charge duration of 5 hours 10 minutes (4 hours for AC and USB combined) for the above definition of overnight charges and a 33 minute median for charges during the day, irrespective of charge type.…”

A survey of cloud supporter: a load balancing framework in cloud using smartphone

“…They enforced an execution setting for automaton that permits for running desktop Java applications on smart phones in an automatic fashion also created similar observations about scheduling tasks based on processing capabilities of smart phones [1].…”

“…To overcome this problem the solution is using smart phones when they are being charged at night, when active use by phone owners is not likely. CWC uses a single server connected to the Internet, for scheduling jobs on the smart phones and collecting the outputs from the computations [1].…”

Autodirective audio capturing through a synchronized smartphone array

“…For example, MicroCast [37] allows closely located smartphones to aggregate the cellular bandwidth, and share downloaded data through WiFi-direct to improve video streaming quality. Recent work, like CWC [38], proposed to harness the computational power of many smartphones to establish a distributed computing platform that offload tasks from costly infrastructures. MobiUS [39] split one video frame between two nearby smartphones to enable better-together viewing experience.…”