SARANA: language, compiler and run-time system support for spatially aware and resource-aware mobile computing

Abstract

Increasingly, spatial awareness plays a central role in many distributed and mobile computing applications. Spatially aware applications rely on information about the geographical position of compute devices and their supported services in order to support novel functionality. While many spatial application drivers already exist in mobile and distributed computing, very little systems research has explored how best to program these applications, to express their spatial and temporal constraints, and to allow efficient implementations on highly dynamic real-world platforms. This paper proposes the SARANA system architecture, which includes language and run-time system support for spatially aware and resource-aware applications. SARANA allows users to express spatial regions of interest, as well as trade-offs between quality of result (QoR), latency and cost. The goal is to produce applications that use resources efficiently and that can be run on diverse resource-constrained platforms ranging from laptops to personal digital assistants and to smart phones. SARANA's run-time system manages QoR and cost trade-offs dynamically by tracking resource availability and locations, brokering usage/pricing agreements and migrating programs to nodes accordingly. A resource cost model permeates the SARANA system layers, permitting users to express their resource needs and QoR expectations in units that make sense to them. Although we are still early in the system development, initial versions have been demonstrated on a nine-node system prototype.

Global positioning system and associated technologies in animal behaviour and ecological research

“…This approach has been used on a limited basis with zebras (Equus quagga; http://www.princeton. edu/~mrm/zebranet.html, accessed 31 January 2010; Juang et al 2002;Martonosi 2006;Hari et al 2008) and wood turtles (Clemmys insculpta; http://prisms.cs. umass.edu/dome/index.php?page=TurtleNet, accessed 31 January 2010).…”

Challenges and Opportunities in Edge Computing

“…Data generated at a user end needs to be often transported to a cloud server for performing any meaningful analytics which has obvious latency and energy implications. However, there is potential to harness resources at the far end of the network if computation can be hierarchically distributed [19]. For example, a typical application pipeline may initially filter data generated on the device, after which analytical workloads are executed on the edge nodes through which data is transmitted, before finally arriving at the cloud server where more complex tasks are performed.…”

Streaming sensor data from dynamically reprogrammable tasks running on mobile devices

“…SARANA [17] is a system architecture that supports the development of applications that execute tasks on remote devices based on the services they can provide (e.g. camera, image analysis).…”