Creating Pervasive, Dynamic, Scalable Android Applications

Smart mobile devices and wireless networks have reshaped the way people execute applications and access information. Many of today's mobile applications are programmed to rely on cloud services to augment the execution of sophisticated tasks with the assumption that the smartphone does not have enough computational resources to handle the tasks in time. However, the current application development model has several shortcomings. First, it can be difficult for a developer to decide how to partition a mobile application if the application workload cannot be known in advance and will be performed by a wide range of devices. Second, to get an application augmented, the application user is required to subscribe to a service, which causes additional efforts and privacy risks. Third, a mobile application that relies on the support of the server-side can suffer seriously from poor network connectivity. The work described in this paper enhances the current Android application framework to address the aforementioned shortcomings. First, we introduce the notion of personal application cloud (PAC), which is a unified service that the user can use to augment many applications without revealing personal data to the application vendors. Then, we provide an application programming interface and runtime support for the developers to create pervasive, scalable Android applications whose execution and data can be dynamically migrated and scaled to benefit from PAC. In addition to the design and implementation of the enhanced framework, latest experimental results are presented as well.