Flexible and Secure Resource Sharing for Mobile Augmentation Systems

Although mobile end-user devices are getting more and more powerful, they still suffer from limited processing capabilities and battery capacities. To address this problem, the augmentation of mobile devices with resources from surrounding devices or with cloud-based resources has gained popularity in the recent years. Existing solutions that follow this approach and offload computationally intensive tasks already yield great results for specific use cases. Unfortunately, most of these solutions are tailored to specific operating systems or programming languages, and do not support the flexible usage of resources. Furthermore, existing solutions implicitly assume external resources to be trustworthy, which is usually not the case in practice. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a secure and flexible resource-discovery solution for mobile augmentation systems especially targeting the pervasive-computing paradigm. This solution enables a dynamic use of external resources and assures that security-critical computations are offloaded to trusted resources only. We demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of our proposed solution by means of a proof-of-concept implementation. The potential of this implementation to improve performance and save energy at the same time is evaluated by means of two resource-intensive applications. Obtained evaluation results show that the proposed solution significantly speeds up applications on mobile devices and reduces their power consumption by 50%. Thus, the proposed solution enables fast, secure, and energy-saving execution of complex mobile applications.