Towards an Elastic Application Model for Augmenting the Computing Capability of Mobile Devices with Cloud Computing

Motivation:

The limited resources provided by smartphones constrain the performances of applications. We consider the cloud computing as a means to augment the capabilities of smartphones.

Because duplicating the runtime environment to the cloud may impact the battery, not take full advantages of cloud resources and increase the complexity, we focus on the application level, which is enabling flexible and optimized elasticity by considering multiple factors.

Main points:

-Two properties of elastic application. Split and partition application so that execution occurs partially on the device and partially on the cloud, dynamic execution configuration of elastic application.

-Three typical elastic patterns. replication pattern, splitter pattern, aggregator pattern.

-We consider a cost model and the optimization execution configuration. Usually we take the power, monetary cost, performance as the attributes of cost model.

-The reference architecture works with Amazon EC2 and S3.

-Build on the reference architecture, SDK is used to develop the basic interfaces of weblet. It’s easy to extend to many languages.

-Some elastic applications: Image processing, augmented reality and augmented video.

-Through the comparison between elastic device and non-elastic device in throughput, CPU usage, available memory, the elastic device shows better performance.

Trade-offs:

-Because the elastic model assigns the application on the cloud and mobile device, we can take use of the resource of cloud, but the time synchronization is a problem.

-In the cost model of elastic device, it takes power, monetary cost,  performance and security as attributes, what about the other attributes such as the connection quality, the switch of connection ways, the workload of the cloud, etc. What if one not considered attribute matters most.

-One of the advantages is that the elastic model is friendly to many languages, but on the other hand, the security of it may not be very well. The difference of encapsulation ways between different languages, the priority and the inherit ways may cause security problems.  

-In the evaluation step, the paper takes the image processing as an example. What about the other situations? The results may change if we process words, videos and etc.