Cooperative Computing for Mobile Platforms

摘要

While mobile platforms with increasing computing power nowadays have become popular, applications running on mobile platforms, however, still suffer from the limitations of resource availability and architecture variety imposed by mobile platforms. Offloading mobile application to a virtual machine deployed on a server or cloud computing environment is 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, this paper considers cross-platform Inter-Process Communication (IPC) to be an essential capability towards achieving cooperative computing at application level and, as a demonstrative example, expands the IPC mechanism of Android system to be the foundation of building a collaborative and cooperative working environment. This expanded 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.