Enabling Cooperative Computing for Android-Based Mobile Platforms

摘要

Mobile devices nowadays has become more popular than ever, but mobile applications still suffer from limitations of available resources imposed by the platforms. Offloading mobile application to a virtual machine deployed on cloud server is one feasible solution. However, this method appears to be effective only for the cases of running stand-alone applications and is not able to achieve cooperative computing across platform boundary. In attempting to address the issue, we consider cross-platform IPC (Inter-Process Communication) to be an essential capability toward achieving cooperative computing at application level and expand the IPC mechanism of Android-based system to be the foundation of building a collaborative and cooperative working environment. This new IPC mechanism is called XBinder. The main contribution of this work is providing a way for mobile applications to cooperate with local or remote services without developing complicate network transmission mechanism. Mobile applications are able to effectively and efficiently communicate with services which execute either on local node or remote node.