简介: Mobile cloud computing (MCC) bridges the gap between the limited capabilities of mobile devices and the increasing complexity of mobile applications, by offloading the local computations to the cloud. In this talk, I will present our recent work on exploiting the mobile system dynamics to address two fundamental problems in MCC: i) what to offload, and ii) how to offload. To address the first problem, we develop analytical models to formulate and exploit the dynamic patterns of mobile applications’ run-time execution for workload offloading. To ensure the energy efficiency of MCC, traditional schemes partition a mobile application and only offload the portion that benefits the most from MCC to the cloud. However, the portion being offloaded is decided only through offline program analysis, and may be inappropriate at run-time due to the heterogeneity of applications’ execution. Our approach takes such run-time heterogeneity into account through a semi-Markov-based formulation, and makes offloading decisions accordingly based on a probabilistic framework. Furthermore, we address the second problem by systematically enforcing the offloading decisions and minimizing the amount of memory contexts being migrated to the cloud. Our approach builds on fine-grained program parsing, which tracks the minimum set of memory contexts that are relevant to remote execution of mobile program methods. The parsing results are then taken as input to support run-time migration of these program methods to the cloud. Our schemes have been integrated to the kernel of Android OS and operate directly over the mobile application executable.

Bio: Wei Gao is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the Pennsylvania State University and BE degree from the University of Science and Technology of China. His research interests include mobile and distributed computing systems, wireless networking, and smart grid, and has published more than 40 papers at top-tier academic conferences and journals including ACM MobiHoc, IEEE INFOCOM, ICNP, ICDCS, and so on. He is a member of IEEE and has been serving at the technical program committee of several premier international conferences.