Leveraging smart phones to reduce mobility footprints

Abstract

Mobility footprint refers to the size, weight, and energy demand of the hardware that must be carried by a mobile user to be effective at any time and place. The ideal of a zero mobility footprint is achievable by encapsulating personal computing state in a virtual machine (VM) and delivering it over the Internet to a locally-obtained computer close to the user. In locations with poor Internet connectivity, the demands placed on WAN bandwidth can result in unacceptable user experience. We show how this challenge can be overcome by using nascent smart phone technology as a trusted personal assistant called Horatio that serves as a self-cleaning portable cache for VM state. Since most users already carry cell phones for voice calls and texting, Horatio does not increase the size or weight aspects of a user's mobility footprint -there is only a small increase in the energy aspect. We have built an experimental prototype of Horatio, and measurements confirm its ability to improve user experience even with current smart phone limitations.

Edge Computing for Legacy Applications

“…This approach is particularly valuable in contexts such as developing countries with poor Internet connectivity. The Soul-Pad and ISR approaches can be combined to achieve faster moves of a virtual desktop, as shown by Smaldone et al 15 .…”

A Survey on Energy Harvesting and Integrated Data Sharing in Wireless Body Area Networks

“…In [56], two currently available smartphones, the Symbian-based Nokia N95 and the Linux-based Openmoko Neo Free Runner, are applied to implement a prototype of Horatio. It reduces suspend latency by saving virtual machine state to the phone.…”

Optimizing Storage Performance for VM-Based Mobile Computing

“…ISR [Kozuch and Satyanarayanan 2002;, the Collective Sapuntzakis et al 2002], and MokaFive [MokaFive 2010], are TransientPC systems that transport VM state over the network from a server, or even from a user's smart phone [Smaldone et al 2009]. While the necessary boot image is typically preinstalled on target machines, zero-install variants of these systems also exist.…”

“…The 5 MB case represents light disk I/O workload, such as Web browsing or online shopping, while the 500 MB case represents a heavy disk I/O workload, such as downloading large files or streaming video. We base our decision to vary modified state between 0-500 MB on prior work [Smaldone et al 2009], in which we measured the amount of state generated by typical user activities to create various macrobenchmark workloads. Finally, in both the base portable USB device and TransPart-0 MB cases, the VM is resumed, allowed to idle for a fixed period of time, and then shut down without any other VM state modifications due to user activity.…”