Serendipity: enabling remote computing among intermittently connected mobile devices

Mobile devices are increasingly being relied on for services that go beyond simple connectivity and require more complex processing. Fortunately, a mobile device encounters, possibly intermittently, many entities capable of lending it computational resources. At one extreme is the traditional cloud-computing context where a mobile device is connected to remote cloud resources maintained by a service provider with which it has an established relationship. In this paper we consider the other extreme, where a mobile device’s contacts are only with other mobile devices, where both the computation initiator and the remote computational resources are mobile, and where intermittent connectivity among these entities is the norm. We present the design and implementation of a system, Serendipity, that enables a mobile computation initiator to use remote computational resources available in other mobile systems in its environment to speedup computing and conserve energy. We propose a simple bu...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: MOBIHOC
• Authors: Cong Shi, Vasileios Lakafosis, Mostafa H. Ammar, Ellen W. Zegura
• Keywords: Computer Communication Networks, Computer Networks, Intermittent Connectivity, MOBIHOC 2012, Mobile Computation