Potluck: Cross-Application Approximate Deduplication for Computation-Intensive Mobile Applications

Emerging mobile applications, such as cognitive assistance and augmented reality (AR) based gaming, are increasingly computation-intensive and latency-sensitive, while running on resource-constrained devices. The standard approaches to addressing these involve either offloading to a cloud(let) or local system optimizations to speed up the computation, often trading off computation quality for low latency. Instead, we observe that these applications often operate on similar input data from the camera feed and share common processing components, both within the same (type of) applications and across different ones. Therefore, deduplicating processing across applications could deliver the best of both worlds. In this paper, we present Potluck, to achieve approximate deduplication. At the core of the system is a cache service that stores and shares processing results between applications and a set of algorithms to process the input data to maximize deduplication opportunities. This is implemented as a background service on Android. Extensive evaluation shows that Potluck can reduce the processing latency for our AR and vision workloads by a factor of 2.5 to 10.