Mobile grid computing has been a popular topic for researchers due to mobile and IoT devices’ ubiquity and their evergrowing processing potential. While many scheduling algorithms for harnessing these resources exist in the literature for standard grid computing scenarios, surprisingly, there is little insight into this matter in the context of hybrid-powered computing resources, typically found in Dew and Edge computing environments. This paper proposes new algorithms aware of devices’ power source for scheduling tasks in hybrid environments, i.e., where the battery- and non-battery-powered devices cooperate. We simulated hybrid Dew/Edge environments by extending DewSim, a simulator that models battery-driven devices’ battery behavior using battery traces profiled from real mobile devices. We compared the throughput and job completion achieved by algorithms proposed in this paper using as a baseline a previously developed algorithm that considers computing resources but only from battery-dependent devices called Enhanced Simple Energy-Aware Schedule (E-SEAS). The obtained results in the simulation reveal that our proposed algorithms can obtain up to a 90% increment in overall throughput and around 95% of completed jobs in hybrid environments compared to E-SEAS. Finally, we show that incorporating these characteristics gives more awareness of the type of resources present and can enable the algorithms to manage resources more efficiently in more hybrid environments than other algorithms found in the literature.
Code offloading is a popular technique for extending the natural capabilities of mobile devices by migrating processor-intensive tasks to resource-rich surrogates. Despite multiple platforms for offloading being available in academia, these frameworks have yet to permeate the industry. One of the primary reasons for this is limited experimentation in practical settings and lack of reliability, scalability, and options for distribution. This paper introduces MobiCOP, a new code offloading framework designed from the ground up with these requirements in mind. It features a novel design fully self-contained in a library and offers compatibility with most stock Android devices available today. Compared to local task executions, MobiCOP offers performance improvements of up to 17x and increased battery efficiency of up to 25x, shows minimum performance degradation in environments with unstable networks, and features an autoscaling module that allows its server counterpart to scale to an arbitrary number of offloading requests. It is compatible with the most relevant Android technologies optimized for heavy computation (NDK and Renderscript) and has so far been well received by fellow mobile developers. We hope MobiCOP will help bring mobile code offloading closer to the industry realm.
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