Project Description:

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) has been used to address the resource limitation of mobile devices by migrating expensive local computations to the cloud. However, transmitting data wirelessly from mobile devices to the cloud also consumes energy. Hence, the key problem of MCC is how to minimize the energy consumption while preserving the mobile application performance. Different from traditional solutions which focus on reducing the cost of wireless transmission solely from the application perspective, this project focuses on designing MCC schemes from a network-centric perspective, by investigating, formulating, and mitigating the impact of special characteristics of wireless networks on the energy efficiency of MCC. The proposed research could benefit end users with various mobile devices by extending their battery lifetime and improving their performance. The results from this research are likely to foster new research directions on supporting MCC from a network-centric perspective. The project will engage under-represented students in the proposed research, and the scholarly discovery of this project will be disseminated broadly to the community.

This project aims to improve the performance of MCC by mitigating the impacts of two special characteristics of wireless networks: the long-tail problem at the wireless interface and the quality variations of the wireless link. More specifically, this project consists of three closely intertwined research thrusts: (i) reducing the amount of tail energy when transmitting the program states to the remote cloud, while ensuring that the performance requirements of mobile applications can be met; (ii) mitigating the impact of wireless link quality on both energy and performance, and minimizing the degradation of application performance when the wireless link quality is low; and (iii) exploiting the difference of wireless link quality among mobile users to further improve the energy efficiency of MCC via user cooperation. An experimental testbed will be developed to investigate the practical impact of wireless network characteristics on MCC and evaluate the proposed MCC schemes.

 

Publications:

  1. 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%)

  2. 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.
  3. 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]

  4. 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%)

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. Minimizing Context Migration in Mobile Code Offload [pdf]
    Yong Li and Wei Gao, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 16(4), 2017, pp. 1005-1018.

  8. 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%)

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

  10. 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%)

  11. Application-Aware Traffic Scheduling for Workload Offloading in Mobile Clouds [pdf]
    Liang Tong and Wei Gao, in Proceedings of the 35th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2016.
    (Acceptance Ratio: 300/1644=18.25%)

 

Participants:

Two PhD dissertations (Haoyang Lu and Yong Li) have been produced as outcomes of this research. This research also supported two other PhD students (Ruirong Chen and Xingzhe Song) towards their PhD dissertations.

 

Software:

  1. Multi-user Virtual Reality supported by mobile cloud.
    To provide VR from untethered mobile devices, a viable solution is to remotely render VR frames from the mobile cloud, but encounters challenges from the limited computation and communication capacities of the edge cloud when serving multiple mobile VR users at the same time. We developed a software toolkit that can be easily inserted into the Android OS kernel and the Unity VR application engine, and allows the mobile cloud to adaptively discover and reuse the redundant VR frame being rendered for different VR users.

  2. Multi-user Virtual Reality supported by mobile cloud.
    To provide VR from untethered mobile devices, a viable solution is to remotely render VR frames from the mobile cloud, but encounters challenges from the limited computation and communication capacities of the edge cloud when serving multiple mobile VR users at the same time. We developed a software toolkit that can be easily inserted into the Android OS kernel and the Unity VR application engine, and allows the mobile cloud to adaptively discover and reuse the redundant VR frame being rendered for different VR users.

  3. A generic interconnection and 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 modifications. The development of this software toolkit is a joint effort between University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University (PSU), and we received great help from Dr. Guohong Cao and his group at PSU.

 

Broader Impact Activities:

 


This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1526769 and 1812399. 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).