Transparent resource sharing framework for internet services on handheld devices

Handheld devices have limited processing power and a short battery lifetime. As a result, computational intensive applications can not run appropriately or cause the device to run out-of-battery too early. Additionally, Internet-based service providers targeting these mobile devices lack information to estimate the remaining battery autonomy and have no view on the availability of idle resources in the neighborhood of the handheld device. In this paper, we propose a transparent resource sharing framework that enables service providers to delegate (a part of) a client application from a handheld device to idle resources in the LAN the device is connected to. The key component is the Resource Sharing service, hosted on the LAN gateway, which can be queried by Internet-based service providers. The service includes a battery model to predict the remaining battery lifetime. We describe the concept of Resource-Sharingas-a-Service that allows users of handheld devices to subscribe to the Resource Sharing service. In a proof-of-concept, we evaluate the delay to offload a client application to an idle computer and study the impact on battery autonomy as a function of the CPU cycles that can be offloaded.