CRII: NeTS: Exploiting System and Network Dynamics in Mobile Clouds

该项目的重点是利用移动的系统和无线网络动态的各个方面来提高移动的云计算的效率。这些动态的利用具有实质性的影响实际集成的移动的设备到云，通过减轻本地计算负担的移动的设备，并允许适应异构系统和环境上下文。这些研究成果将为高交互性移动的计算系统的研究开辟新的理论和系统研究领域。该项目计划让女生和代表人数不足的少数民族学生参与研究活动，并向社区广泛传播研究成果。移动的云计算通过将计算工作量从本地设备卸载到远程云，弥合了移动的设备的有限能力与移动的应用程序日益复杂之间的差距。然而，移动的云计算的有效性可能会受到系统和网络环境的动态特性的影响，这会导致异构的移动的应用行为，并严重降低工作负载卸载决策的适当性。本研究的目标是利用这些关键动态的移动的云是不可或缺的高效，及时和可靠的工作负载卸载。更具体地说，该项目解决了移动的云计算中三个紧密交织的研究问题。第一部分研究如何分析制定运行时应用程序执行的随机特性，基于此工作负载卸载的决策概率和系统的技术开发，实际上执行这样的决定。第二部分将移动的云应用的上下文和性能需求融入到无线网络设计中，通过对无线传输调度算法的根本性重新设计，自适应地平衡移动的云中的无线能量开销和应用性能。第三部分着重于测试床的开发，以自动调查运行时系统和网络动态的移动的云应用程序在实践中。该测试平台由现成的智能手机和可穿戴设备组成，可以进行现场实验，以评估所提出的技术和系统设计的性能。

This project focuses on exploiting various aspects of mobile system and wireless network dynamics to improve the efficiency of mobile cloud computing. Exploitation of these dynamics has substantial impacts on practical integration of mobile devices into the cloud, by alleviating the local computation burden of mobile devices and allowing adaptation to the heterogeneous system and environmental contexts. The research results are likely to inspire novel theoretical and systematic studies that open up new areas of research in highly interactive mobile computing systems. The project plans to engage female and under-represented minority students in the research activities and disseminate the research results broadly to the community.Mobile cloud computing bridges the gap between the limited capabilities of mobile devices and the increasing complexity of mobile applications, by offloading the computational workloads from local devices to the remote cloud. However, the effectiveness of mobile cloud computing could be impaired by the dynamic nature of system and network contexts, which lead to heterogeneous mobile application behaviors and seriously reduce the appropriateness of workload offloading decisions. The goal of this research is to exploit these critical dynamics in mobile clouds that are indispensable to efficient, prompt, and reliable workload offloading. More specifically, the project addresses three closely intertwined research issues in mobile cloud computing. The first part investigates how to analytically formulate the stochastic characteristics of run-time application executions, based on which the workload offloading decisions are probabilistically made and systematic techniques are developed to practically enforce such decisions. The second part incorporates the contexts and performance requirements of mobile cloud applications into the design of wireless networks, so as to adaptively balance between the wireless energy cost and application performance in mobile clouds through fundamental redesign of wireless transmission scheduling algorithms. The third part focuses on testbed development to automatically investigate the run-time system and network dynamics of mobile cloud applications in practice. This testbed consists of off-the-shelf smartphones and wearable devices, and enables in-field experiments for evaluating the performance of the proposed techniques and system designs.