Project Description:

Proliferation of mobile computing devices transforms the way people behave and access information in every aspect of their daily life. However, diverse manufacturing limits make current mobile devices far from ideal for being used anytime, anywhere. Instead, each device can only fit to a specific scenario. Traditional research strives to design individual mobile devices for different application scenarios by exploring tradeoffs among the various design perspectives, but cannot scale to the increasing complexity of future mobile applications and satisfy their requirements on the performance of mobile computing system.

The goal of this project is to develop key enabling technologies in wireless networks and mobile systems that realize Interconnected Mobile Computing (IMC). Instead of separately operating individual mobile devices, IMC fully interconnects multiple mobile devices owned by the same user via wireless networks, and allows these devices to complement each other via cooperative resource sharing. Hence, it fundamentally removes the physical boundary between devices and augments the mobile computing capability provided to user. The proposed research aims to ensure efficiency, adaptability and generality of IMC. First, we will design an extra communication channel in the wireless link that dedicates to resource sharing between mobile devices, hence minimizing the transmission latency of resource sharing and ensuring efficiency of IMC. Second, we will develop distributed network algorithms for resource sharing decisions, which adapt to frequent changes of network topology and maximize the efficiency of shared resource utilization. Third, a mobile middleware will be developed as the generic system interface to support mobile applications' remote access to shared system resources. The proposed designs will be implemented and evaluated over a medium-scale mobile testbed of software-defined radios and off-the-shelf mobile devices, and will also be validated by large-scale trace-based emulation.

 

Selected publications (Complete List):

  1. MyoMonitor: Evaluating Muscle Fatigue with Commodity Smartphones [pdf]
    Xingzhe Song, Hongshuai Li and Wei Gao, Elsevier Smart Health, vol. 19, article No. 100175, 2021.

  2. SpiroSonic: Monitoring Human Lung Function via Acoustic Sensing on Commodity Smartphones [pdf]
    Xingzhe Song, Boyuan Yang, Ge Yang, Ruirong Chen, Erick Forno, Wei Chen and Wei Gao, in Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), 2020.
    (Acceptance Ratio: 62/384=16.1%)

  3. MagHacker: Eavesdropping on Stylus Pen Writing via Magnetic Sensing from Commodity Mobile Devices [pdf]
    Yihao Liu, Kai Huang, Xingzhe Song, Boyuan Yang and Wei Gao, in Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), 2020.
    (Acceptance Ratio: 34/175=19.4%)

  4. StarLego: Enabling Custom Physical-Layer Wireless over Commodity Devices [pdf]
    Ruirong Chen and Wei Gao, in Proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile), 2020.

  5. Minimizing Wireless Delay with a High-Throughput Side Channel [pdf]
    Ruirong Chen, Haoyang Lu and Wei Gao, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 19(7), 2020. pp. 1634-1648.

  6. Towards a Personal Mobile Cloud via Generic Device Interconnections [pdf]
    Yong Li and Wei Gao, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 19(12), 2020, pp. 2965-2980.

  7. EasyPass: Combating IoT Delays with Multiple Access Wireless Side Channels [pdf]
    Haoyang Lu, Ruirong Chen and Wei Gao, in Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), 2019. [Best Paper Award]
    (Acceptance Ratio: 32/190=16.8%) [Media coverage: AllAboutCircuits, Pitt Engineering News, IoTTechNews]

  8. Enabling Cross-Technology Coexistence for Extremely Weak Wireless Devices [pdf]
    Ruirong Chen and Wei Gao, in Proceedings of the 38th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2019.
    (Acceptance Ratio: 288/1464=19.7%)

  9. DeltaVR: Achieving High-Performance Mobile VR Dynamics through Pixel Reuse [pdf]
    Yong Li and Wei Gao, in Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2019.

  10. MUVR: Supporting Multi-User Mobile Virtual Reality with Resource Constrained Edge Cloud [pdf]
    Yong Li and Wei Gao, in Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC), 2018.

  11. Continuous Wireless Link Rates for Internet of Things [pdf]
    Haoyang Lu and Wei Gao, in Proceedings of the 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2018.
    (Acceptance Ratio: 22/82=26.8%)

  12. Interconnecting Heterogeneous Devices in the Personal Mobile Cloud [pdf]
    Yong Li and Wei Gao, in Proceedings of the 36th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2017.
    (Acceptance Ratio: 292/1395=20.9%)

  13. Scheduling Dynamic Wireless Networks with Limited Operations [pdf]
    Haoyang Lu and Wei Gao, in Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), 2016.
    (Acceptance Ratio: 46/229=20.1%)

  14. Supporting Real-Time Wireless Traffic through A High-Throughput Side Channel [pdf]
    Haoyang Lu and Wei Gao, in Proceedings of the 17th ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc), 2016.
    (Acceptance Ratio: 35/187=18.7%)

 

Participants:

 

Software:

  1. A Generic Resource Sharing Framework between Remote Mobile Systems
    Remote resource access across mobile systems augments local mobile devices' capabilities, but is challenging due to the heterogeneity of mobile hardware. Instead of tackling with the low-layer drivers, I/O stacks and data access interfaces of individual hardware, we developed a software framework that exploits the existing OS services as the interface for remote resource access. This framework is implemented as a middleware in Android OS, and supports generic sharing of various hardware (GPS, accelerometer, audio speaker, camera) between remote mobile devices. It can be migrated to diverse types of devices, including smartphones, tablets and smartwatches, with minimum modi cations.

  2. A High-Throughput Wireless Side Channel Design
    To prevent delay-sensitive traffic from experiencing excessive queueing delay in congested wireless links, we developed a prototype system over USRP, which implements a high-throughput wireless side channel exclusively for delay-sensitive traffic. Our system is built based on our 802.11a reference design, and encodes the side channel data as patterned interference over data frames in the main channel.

  3. 802.11a PHY and MAC Reference Design for GNURadio/USRP
    The existing few open-source 802.11 reference designs for the GNURadio/USRP software-defined radio (SDR) platform are discretionary and user unfriendly. We developed a complete 802.11a reference design that includes fully functional PHY and MAC layers over the latest GNURadio platform. It implements several mainstream rate adaptation algorithms such as Minstrel and AARF, from which instructions of link rates are directly transferred to the PHY module and applied to subsequent modulation and frame encoding.

 

Educational Activities:

Based on the research outcome of this project, the PI has developed a new graduate course, ECE 692: Mobile Network Systems Design, at University of Tennessee Knoxville. This course introduces graduate students, in the beginning phase of their graduate studies, to the frontier of mobile and wireless networking and systems research.

The outcome of this research has been integrated into the curriculum of multiple undegraduate courses at Pitt, including ECE1160: Embedded Computer System Design I and ECE 1175: Embedded Systems Design, to provide undergraduate students with pioneering contents and topics for their semester-long course projects.

The PI has exploited the proposed research in this project to provide research opportunities to multiple undergraduate students at both University of Pittsburgh and University of Tennessee Knoxville, including Alana Dee (2020), Eureka Zheng (2018), Austin Whited (2018), Sarah Bednar (2017), Chris Daffron (2016).

At University of Tennessee, the PI has been actively involved into the REU Program of the NSF-funded Engineering Research Center - CURENT, and was regularly giving guest lectures to undergraduate studnets at CURENT Summer Camps.

 

Broader Impact Outcomes:

The research outcome of this project has been applied to a broader scope of application scenarios, by exploring the potential of Interconnected Mobile Computing to address the urgent societal needs. In particular, the PI is currently collaborating with the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh to develop mobile systems that allow in-home self-evaluation of possible COVID-19 infections through commodity smartphones. This work has been reported by several news media internationally [WGN TV, Daily Mail, News Medical, Medical Express, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette].

The PI has been actively involving minority and underrepresented groups of students into research. He is supervising and has supervised multiple female undergraduate and graduate students at Pitt, including Alana Dee (2020), Weonji Lucia Choi (MS, 2018), Sarah Bednar (2017).

The PI was actively involved into the Research Experience for Teachers (RET) program at University of Tennessee Knoxville, to assist teachers from the West High School in the Knox County to develop their Advanced Placement (AP) computer science curriculum. He also gave regular lectures and tutorials to high school students during the UTK CURENT's K-12 summer camps, to stimulate students' interests in STEM majors.


This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1553395 and 1812407. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).