Memory Offloading via Garbage Collection for Memory Constrained Devices

Our everyday life is becoming increasingly filled with computing devices. Among them, mobile and embedded devices usually have far more limited resource specifications than wired and consequently more powerful computing devices. In order to increase available software on mobile devices it is beneficial to reuse existing software platforms or applications. Conventional wisdom has been to trim down current software to fit them into smaller devices. However, we believe that when surrounded by other computer resources there is an alternative solution for certain resource, in which resource limited devices can utilize those resources by dynamically offloading services. In this paper, we examine the use of “memory offloading” as a means of relieving memory constraints in Java environments. Our experiments we have found that using virtual memory to relieve resource constraints from JVMs can lead to very bad performance due to Java’s garbage collector. We propose extending the garbage collector of a JVM we allow it to take into account the semantics of Java memory usage to provide efficient and transparent memory offloading. Our results using a modified JVM show that with moderate monitoring overhead, both migration policies investigated can achieve a 85% reduction in bandwidth requirement and even more in necessary number of messages for most of application benchmarks we used.