ThinkAir: Dynamic resource allocation and parallel execution in the cloud for mobile code offloading
Dr. Pan Hui
Deutsche Telekom

Abstract

Smartphones have exploded in popularity in recent years, becoming ever more sophisticated and capable. As a result, developers worldwide are building increasingly complex applications that require ever increasing amounts of computational power and energy. In this paper we propose ThinkAir, a framework that makes it simple for developers to migrate their smartphone applications to the cloud. ThinkAir exploits the concept of smartphone virtualization in the cloud and provides method-level computation offloading. Advancing on previous work, it focuses on the elasticity and scalability of the cloud and enhances the power of mobile cloud computing by parallelizing method execution using multiple virtual machine (VM) images. We implement ThinkAir and evaluate it with a range of benchmarks starting from simple micro-benchmarks to more complex applications. First, we show that the execution time and energy consumption decrease two orders of magnitude for a N-queens puzzle application and one order of magnitude for a face detection and a virus scan application. We then show that a parallelizable application can invoke multiple VMs to execute in the cloud in a seamless and on-demand manner such as to achieve greater reduction on execution time and energy consumption. We finally use a memory hungry image combiner tool to demonstrate that applications can dynamically request VMs with more computational power in order to meet their computational requirements.

Bio

Dr. Pan Hui is a senior research scientist in Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin Germany. He received his PhD from Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. During his PhD, he also affiliated with Intel Research Cambridge. Before that he was with University of Hong Kong for his Mphil and bachelor degree. His research interests include delay tolerant networking, mobile networking and systems, planet-scale mobility measurement, social networking and computing, and the application of complex network science in communication system design. Dr. Hui has published more than 80 international papers, book chapters, and technical reports in the areas of mobile computing and social networking, and have accumulative more than 2,200 academic citations He has founded 3 and have chaired 9 IEEE/ACM conferences/workshops, and served on the technical program committee of 28 international conferences and workshops including IEEE Infocom, SECON, MASS and Globecom. Dr. Hui has supervised 26 international interns from University of Texas at Austin, Princeton University, University of Cambridge, University College London, and University of Southern California etc. He also has very close collaboration with Tsinghua University including supervising PhD, MSc and bachelor students and funding under NSF China. More information about his profile and his research work can be found at http://www.deutsche-telekom-laboratories.de/~panhui/