Mirroring Smartphones for Good: A Feasibility Study

More and more applications and functionalities have been introduced to smartphones, but smartphones have limited resources on computation and battery. To enhance the capacity of smartphones, an interesting idea is to use Cloud Computing and virtualization techniques to shift the workload from smartphones to a computational infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a new framework which keeps a mirror for each smartphone on a computing infrastructure in the telecom network. With mirror, we can greatly reduce the workload and virtually expand the resources of smartphones. We show the feasibility of deploying such a framework in telecom networks by protocol design, synchronization study and scalability test. To show the benefit, we introduce two applications where both the computational workload on smartphones and network traffic in telecom networks can be significantly reduced by our techniques.