Roelof Kemp

Cuckoo: A Computation Offloading Framework for Smartphones

Offloading computation from smartphones to remote cloud resources has recently been rediscovered as a technique to enhance the performance of smartphone applications, while reducing the energy usage.

eyeDentify: Multimedia Cyber Foraging from a Smartphone

The recent introduction of smartphones has resulted in an explosion of innovative mobile applications. The computational requirements of many of these applications, however, can not be met by the smartphone itself. The compute power of the smartphone can be enhanced by distributing the application over other compute resources. Existing solutions comprise of a light weight client running on the smartphone and a heavy weight compute server running on, for example, a cloud. This places the user in a dependent position, however, because the user only controls the client application. In this paper, we follow a different model, called cyber foraging, that gives users full control over all parts of the application. We have implemented the model using the Ibis middleware. We evaluate the model using an innovative application in the domain of multimedia computing, and show that cyber foraging increases the applications responsiveness and accuracy whilst decreasing its energy usage.

Real-World Distributed Computer with Ibis

The use of parallel and distributed computing systems is essential to meet the ever-increasing computational demands of many scientific and industrial applications. Ibis allows easy programming and deployment of compute-intensive distributed applications, even for dynamic, faulty, and heterogeneous environments.

The Smartphone and the Cloud: Power to the User

In this paper we study how smartphones can benefit from the resources available in clouds. Unfortunately, integrating smartphones with cloud resources is challenging and comes with dangers for the user in terms of loss of control of applications and data as portions move into the cloud. In this paper we outline our work on the Interdroid project, where we are building a framework for smart applications for smartphones which includes components for integration with the cloud.

Energy Efficient Information Monitoring Applications on Smartphones through Communication Offloading

People increasingly use a wide variety of applications on their smartphones, thereby putting an ever higher burden on their phone’s battery. Unfortunately, battery capacity does not keep up with the energy demand of these applications. Various solutions have been proposed to get as much work as possible done with the scarcely available energy, among which offloading heavy weight computation to cloud resources.

SWAN-song: a flexible context expression language for smartphones

The rise of smartphones, with numerous on board sensors, significant processing power, and multiple networking technologies, has finally created an environment perfect for contextual applications. While examples of such applications exist today, it has been recognized that an intermediate layer between applications and sensors based on contextual expressions simplifies the creation of new context aware applications and sensors as well as streamlines evaluation of such expressions. Key to such an intermediate context layer is a domain specific language in which the individual context conditions are combined into an expression that is meaningful to the contextual application. To this end we present SWAN-Song, a domain specific language for context expressions. The addition of history windowing and history reduction in expressions, not found in similar languages such as CMQ or AnonyTL, significantly improves the expressivity of SWAN-Song, and also enables smart evaluation of such expressions through delaying re-evaluation and/or temporarily turning off sensors.

Opportunistic communication for multiplayer mobile gaming: lessons learned from PhotoShoot

In this paper we describe how a mobile multiplayer game benefits from opportunistic communication.

The Case for Smartphones as an Urgent Computing Client Platform

Abstract The computing world is now populated with smartphones which combine the features of a phone with a general purpose computer and come loaded with sensors including digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, accelerometers and many more. In this paper we argue that these devices are an ideal platform for collecting data for use in urgent computing simulations. We describe how these devices will have far reaching impacts on how people connect with and organize their communities and discuss how this coincides with the rise of community driven response to disasters and the need for decentralized command and control that is discussed in disaster management literature. We also that smartphones, by providing technology which can network people without the use of centralized infrastructure, and which are carried, used, and maintained as part of daily life, are a promising platform for building distributed disaster management applications, which could be part of the inputs provided to an urgent computing simulation. In this paper we describe not only the potential of the platform, but also analyze the challenges it faces in order to realize that potential, and discuss how our middleware is designed to meet these challenges and bring about the future of disaster management applications for smartphones using urgent computing.

A Decentralized Decision Support System for Mobile Devices

With this demonstration we present Decisionlib, a Distributed Decision Support System that runs on mobile devices. Decisionlib is a flexible, durable, and robust voting system which places emphasis on communication and error handling in order to provide reliable and easy to program group-based decisions on distributed mobile devices. Written on top of the Ibis [4] distributed communication system, Decisionlib represents the state of the art for group decision making on mobile devices.

Interdroid Versioned Databases: Decentralized Collaborative Authoring of Arbitrary Relational Data for Android Powered Mobile Devices

Complex interactions in software development have led to the creation of version control systems to manage source code. These systems have become increasingly flexible and support disconnected and decentralized operations.