M2: Multi-Mobile Computing

With the widespread use of mobile systems, there is a growing demand for apps that can enable users to collaboratively use multiple mobile systems, including hardware device features such as cameras, displays, speakers, microphones, sensors, and input. We present M2, a system for multi-mobile computing by enabling remote sharing and combining of devices across multiple mobile systems. M2 leverages higher-level device abstractions and encoding and decoding hardware in mobile systems to define a cross-platform interface for remote device sharing to operate seamlessly across heterogeneous mobile hardware and software. M2 can be used to build new multi-mobile apps as well as make existing unmodified apps multi-mobile aware through the use of fused devices, which transparently combine multiple devices into a more capable one. We have implemented an M2 prototype on Android that operates across heterogeneous hardware and software, including using Android and iOS remote devices, the latter allowing iOS users to also run Android apps. Our results using unmodified apps from Google Play show that M2 can enable even display-intensive 2D and 3D games to use remote devices across multiple mobile systems with modest overhead and qualitative performance indistinguishable from using local device hardware.