Enabling Run-Time Managed Distributed Mobile Computing

The increasing pervasiveness of mobile devices combined with their replacement rate, led us to deal with the disposal of an increasing amount of still working electronic devices. This work proposes an approach to mitigate this problem by extending the mobile devices’ lifetime, by integrating them as part of a distributed mobile computing system. Thanks also to the growing computational power of such devices, this paradigm opens up the opportunity to deploy mobile applications in a distributed manner. This, without forgetting the energy budget management as a paramount objective. In this work, we built a proof-of-concept, based on the extension of a run-time resource manager to support Android applications. We introduced a energy-aware device selection policy to dispatch the application workload according to both device capabilities and run-time status. Experimental results show that, as well as increasing the utilization of multiple mobile devices available to the single user, using an energy-efficiency and distributed approach can increase the battery duration between 12% and 36%.