Mobile computing has been an indispensable part of modern life. However, diverse manufacturing limits make current mobile devices far from ideal for being used anytime, anywhere. Traditional solutions design individual mobile devices for different application scenarios by exploring tradeoffs among the various design perspectives, but cannot scale to the increasing complexity and performance requirements of future mobile applications. Instead, the vision of this project is Interconnected Mobile Computing (IMC), which fully interconnects multiple mobile devices owned by the same user via wireless networks and allows these devices to complement each other via cooperative resource sharing. IMC aims to fundamentally remove the physical boundary between mobile devices and hence augment the mobile computing capability provided to the user. The success of this research could fully unleash the potential of heterogeneous mobile devices and allow insertion of highly pervasive and cognitive mobile applications into every aspect of human life. The results from this research are likely to foster new research directions on mobile computing and benefit a broader scope of cyber-physical systems such as industry control, remote sensing and connected healthcare. The project will actively apply the research results into development of undergraduate curriculum, engage under-represented students into research, and exploit the research outcomes for K-12 educational and outreach programs.
This project intends to develop key enabling technologies in wireless networks and mobile systems that ensure the efficiency, adaptability and generality of IMC. More specifically, this project consists of three closely intertwined research thrusts: (i) reducing the wireless transmission latency of resource sharing between mobile devices by designing an extra wireless communication channel that dedicates to IMC; ii) ensuring adaptability of resource sharing to various network and system dynamics by designing distributed network algorithms for resource sharing decisions; and iii) systematically supporting generic resource access between remote mobile systems via development of new mobile OS interfaces. The proposed technical designs will be implemented and evaluated over a medium-scale mobile testbed of software-defined radios and off-the-shelf mobile devices, and will also be validated by large-scale trace-based emulation.
