Early Experience with Mobile Computation Outsourcing

Abstract

End-user mobile devices such as smart phones, PDAs, and tablets, offer the promise of anywhere, anytime computing and communication. Users increasingly expect their mobile device to support the same activities (and same performance) as their desktop counterparts: seamless multitasking, ubiquitous data access, social networking, game playing, and real work, while on-the-go. To support mobility, these devices are typically constrained in terms of their compute power, energy, and network bandwidth. Supporting the full-array of desired desktop applications and behavior yet retaining the flexibility of the mobile cannot always be met using local resources alone. To achieve this vision, additional resources must be easily harnessed on-demand. In this paper, we describe opportunities for mobile outsourcing using external proxy resources. We present several application scenarios and preliminary results.