Computing with Nearby Mobile Devices: A Work Sharing Algorithm for Mobile Edge-Clouds

As mobile devices evolve to be powerful and pervasive computing tools, their usage also continues to increase rapidly. However, mobile device users frequently experience problems when running intensive applications on the device itself, or offloading to remote clouds, due to resource shortage and connectivity issues. Ironically, most users’ environments are saturated with devices with significant computational resources. This paper argues that nearby mobile devices can efficiently be utilised as a crowd-powered resource cloud to complement the remote clouds. Node heterogeneity, unknown worker capability, and dynamism are identified as essential challenges to be addressed when scheduling work among nearby mobile devices. We present a work-sharing model, called Honeybee, using an adaptation of the well-known work stealing method to load balance independent jobs among heterogeneous mobile nodes, able to accommodate nodes randomly leaving and joining the system. The overall strategy of Honeybee is to focus on short-term goals, taking advantage of opportunities as they arise, based on the concepts of proactive workers and opportunistic delegator. We evaluate our model using a prototype framework built using Android and implement two applications. We report speedups of up to four with seven devices and energy savings up to 71 percent witheight devices.