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ECE Seminar* Speaker: Dr. Yonggang Wen, Nanyang Technological University

When: Wednesday, September 30, 2015
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Where: Science & Engineering Building, Lester W. Cory Conference Room: Room 213A
Cost: free
Description: Topic: TOWARDS UNIFIED DECISION-MAKING FRAMEWORK FOR MOBILE APP OFFLOADING TO CLOUD COMPUTING: FROM THEORY TO PRODUCTS

Location: Lester W. Cory Conference Room, Science & Engineering Building (Group II), Room 213A
Abstract:
An eminent tussle has emerged between the growing demand for rich applications on mobile devices and the limited supply of onboard resources (e.g., computing capacity, battery, etc). The latter is fundamentally hindered by the physical size of mobile devices as dictated by its mobility nature. In this research, we propose to leverage the seemingly unlimited resources in cloud computing to extend the capability of mobile devices via application offloading. In particular, resource-hungry mobile applications are offloaded to a cloud platform in proximity. The cloud platform provides a virtual machine, as a digital clone of the physical device, to execute dynamically-offloaded tasks. The mobile app offloading approach pivots on two complementary technical contributions. First, previous research efforts have been focusing on exploring alternative mechanisms to implement application offloading, including Cloudlet, Cloud Clone and Weblet, etc. Second, it demands a unified decision-making framework to understand a fundamental trade-off between communication overhead and computation saving, in the presence of inherent system uncertainty (e.g., varying channel conditions, dynamic computing complexity, etc). In this talk, we present a unified mathematical framework to determine whether it is beneficial to offload a mobile app to the cloud in proximity. We model the mobile workflow as a directed graph, whose vertices represent computing load of a specific module and edges represent data exchange between modules. A policy engine determines whether a vertex should be offloaded to the cloud for execution, by trading the computation cost on the mobile device over the communication overhead between the mobile device and the cloud. We formulate this decision-making challenge as a constrained optimization problem, with an objective to minimize a chosen cost metric (e.g., energy comsumption) for either the mobile user or the mobile service provider, under the constraint of quality of service (QoS) requirements (e.g., delay deadline). Our analytical framework builds on solving a series of progressively-challenging sub-problems with an increasing complexity of the workflow graph, namely, graph of a single node, linear topology and directed acyclic graph. For each of these sub-problems, we have developed either closed-form solutions or efficient algorithms to provide operational guideline for optimal mobile app offloading. Our theoretic framework is further verified by two real system developments. In our group, we have developed a multi-screen cloud Social TV system (i.e., Yubigo), allowing video-streaming session to seamlessly migrate across different screens (e.g., TV, laptop and smartphone). It builds upon the clone-based model to offload the session management onto a dedicated service container in the cloud. Our research has also inspired an open-source cloud robotic framework (i.e., Rapyuta), which was developed by EPFL researcher by adopting our proposed clone-based model. Both projects have been spun off as start-up with public and/or private investment.

The Seminars is open to the public free of charge.

*For further information, please contact Dr. Honggang Wang at 508.999.8469, or via email at hwang1@umassd.edu.
Topical Areas: General Public, University Community, College of Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering