Platform Support for Mobile Collaboration

Abstract

Mobile collaboration possibilities with today’s feature-rich mobile devices go far beyond simple media content sharing, traditional video conferencing and cloud-based software as a service. The realization of these possibilities for the new generation of mobile collaborative applications requires non-trivial amounts of efforts in enabling multi-device resource and application sharing. The current model of mobile collaboration requires each device to install a particular, ‘full’ mobile application for corresponding collaboration. Besides, collaboration functionalities are typically implemented at the application level. In this thesis, we present CollaboRoid and Single Application Multiple Device (SAMD) as platform-level mobile collaboration frameworks. CollaboRoid is a platform-level solution that provides a set of system services for resource sharing between mobile devices. CollaboRoid’s platform-level design significantly eases the development of mobile collaborative applications. In particular, it abstracts the sharing of not only hardware resources but also software resources and multimedia contents between multiple heterogeneous mobile devices. We implement CollaboRoid in the application framework layer of the Android stack and evaluate it with several collaboration scenarios on Nexus 5 and 7 devices. Our experimental results show the feasibility of the platform-level collaboration using CollaboRoid in terms of the latency and energy consumption. Single Application Multiple Device (SAMD) is also a platform-level mobile collaboration framework. A mobile application developed using SAMD allows fine-grained application sharing. In particular, SAMD enables devices, agreed to participate in collaboration, to get portions of the application on-the-fly and run them without the prior installation. To achieve this, we have developed three solutions as core functionalities of SAMD: 1) Controller packaging, 2) lookahead transfer and 3) code adaptation. We have implemented SAMD on Android as a proof-of-concept prototype. Our experimental results demonstrate SAMD can provide fine-grained sharing of latency-insensitive applications.