Simplifying Cyber Foraging for Mobile Devices

When developing software for mobile applications, it is becoming increasingly important to allow mobile devices to make transient and opportunistic use of compute servers. This can be achieved by cyber foraging — running parts of the software on compute servers and the rest locally. However, the short market life of mobile devices demands that retargeting applications to use cyber foraging must be done quickly. The retargeting problem is made harder as these applications may also be written in a variety of languages and programming styles. In this talk, I describe a software engineering solution for rapid retargeting that combines a specification of cyber foraging with an adaptive runtime system. This solution has been validated using a user study and the results were very promising. Novice developers were able to retarget large unknown applications, written in a variety of languages, in just a few hours. Furthermore, the quality of the retargeted applications was also excellent.
Rajesh Krishna Balan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Systems at the Singapore Management University. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006. Rajesh's research interests include mobile and pervasive computing, distributed software development, operating and distributed systems, massively multiplayer mobile game platforms, and low power protocols for mobile devices.