NeTS: Medium: Mobile Computing over Intermittently Connected Networks

移动的设备越来越多地被依赖于许多服务，这些服务超越了简单的连接，需要更复杂的处理。这些应用程序已成为日常生活中不可或缺的一部分。这是由于两种趋势。首先，真正便携的移动的设备，如智能手机和平板电脑，是越来越强大的设备，具有处理和存储能力，每一代都有重大的进步。第二个趋势是用于移动的设备的改进的连接选项的可用性，其通过利用远程处理和存储来实现超越单个设备的能力的应用。将某些移动的应用程序中可能需要的“繁重工作”加载到专门指定的服务器或服务器集群。用于移动的应用的远程处理的另一种技术提出了使用微云，其使用虚拟机技术在附近的计算资源上提供实时实例化的软件。这项先前的工作假设基于基础设施的计算资源可用，并且还需要在计算任务期间与这些资源保持良好的持续连接。这使得处理移动的设备的间歇连接的重要且具有挑战性的问题未得到解决。这项工作将推广远程移动的计算范式，使其在间歇性连接的存在下运行。这反过来又提供了利用更多计算资源的重要能力，包括那些由非自愿连接的云提供的资源，甚至是那些在其他移动的设备中可用的资源。我们的工作可以被看作是使一个真正的一般性的网络觅食的设想移动的应用程序“生活在地上”，通过利用附近的计算资源。研究工作将由一个跨学科的团队，其中包括研究人员与专业知识在移动的无线网络，在程序划分和执行在移动的环境中，并在建设应用程序，涉及分析和解释丰富的多媒体数据进行。这项工作将包括以下方面的努力：1）为具有不同远程计算资源可用性和多种间歇连接功能的许多场景开发远程执行框架，2）开发针对非连续连接环境的应用程序分析和分区，3）实验顺序和并行应用程序，4）通过概念验证原型以及广泛的仿真进行评估。智力优点：这项工作概括了移动的计算范例，包括充分考虑移动的设备的计算能力增加以及它们固有的间歇连接。在这样做的时候，我们借鉴和推动程序分析，网络在间歇性连接的环境中，和移动的多媒体应用程序的最新进展。在这项研究中开发的统一框架具有概念和实用价值;它为移动的应用程序可以利用和动态适应任何和所有可用资源的未来奠定了基础。这项工作是多学科的，从事该项目的学生将接触到计算机科学学科交叉的问题，如网络，编程语言，分布式处理。我们的研究还将使在网络边缘运行的应用程序，没有固定的基础设施，从而使公民在他们所在的地方，有限的外部依赖。

Mobile devices are increasingly being relied on for a number of services that go beyond simple connectivity and require more complex processing. Such applications have become an indispensable part of everyday life. This has been made possible by two trends. First, truly portable mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are increasingly capable devices with processing and storage capabilities that make significant step improvements with every generation. A second trend is the availability of improved connectivity options for mobile devices which have enabled applications that transcend an individual device's capabilities by making use of remote processing and storage.The primary approach in wide-use today to enable such remote processing makes use of standard cloud computing resources to off-load the 'heavy lifting' that may be required in some mobile applications to specially designated servers or server clusters. Another technique for remote processing of mobile applications proposes the use of cloudlets which provide software instantiated in real-time on nearby computing resources using virtual machine technology. This previous work assumes the availability of infrastructure-based compute resources and additionally requires good, constant connectivity to such resources for the duration of a computational task. This leaves the important and challenging question of handling intermittent connectivity of mobile devices unaddressed. This work will generalize the remote mobile computing paradigm to enable its operation in the presence of intermittent connectivity. This, in turn, provides the important ability to leverage more compute resources including those provided by intermittently-connected cloudlets and even those available in other mobile devices. Our work can be viewed as enabling a truly general vision of cyber foraging which envisions mobile applications 'living off the land' by exploiting nearby computational resources.The research work will be conducted by an interdisciplinary team which includes researchers with expertise in mobile wireless networks, in program partitioning and execution in mobile environments, and in building applications that involve analysis and interpretation of rich multimedia data. The work will include efforts in 1) development of a remote execution framework for a number of scenarios with varying availability of remote compute resources and a diversity of intermittent connectivity features, 2) development of application profiling and partitioning tailored to intermittently-connected environments, 3) experimentation with sequential and embarrassingly parallel applications, and 4) evaluation through proof-of-concept prototypes as well as extensive emulation.Intellectual Merit: This work generalizes the mobile computing paradigm to include full consideration of the increased computational power of mobile devices together with their inherent intermittent connectivity. In doing so, we draw upon and push forward recent advances in program analysis, networking in intermittently connected environments, and mobile multimedia applications. The unified framework developed within this research has conceptual and pragmatic value; it sets the stage for a future in which mobile applications can leverage and dynamically adapt to any and all available resources.Broader Impacts: The work is multi-disciplinary, and the students working on the project will be exposed to problems that lie in the intersection of computer science disciplines such as networking, programming languages, and distributed processing. Our research will also enable applications that run at the edge of the network and without fixed infrastructure, thus empowering citizens where they are, with limited external dependencies.