Addressing connectivity challenges for mobile computing and communication

Mobile devices are increasingly being relied on for computation intensive and/or communication intensive applications that go beyond simple connectivity and demand more complex processing. This has been made possible by two trends. First, mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are increasingly capable devices with processing and storage capabilities that make significant step improvements with every generation. Second, many improved connectivity options (e.g., 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth) are also available to mobile devices. In the rich computing and communication environment, it is promising but also challenging for mobile devices to take advantage of various available resources to improve the performance of mobile applications. First, with varying connectivity, remote computing resources are not always accessible to mobile devices in a predictable way. Second, given the uncertainty of connectivity and computing resources, their contention will become severe. This thesis seeks to address the connectivity challenges for mobile computing and communication. We propose a set of techniques and systems that help mobile applications to better handle the varying network connectivity in the utilization of various computation and communication resources. This thesis makes the following contributions: We design and implement Serendipity to allow a mobile device to use other encountered, albeit intermittently, mobile devices to speedup the execution of parallel applications through carefully allocating computation tasks among intermittently connected mobile devices. We design and implement IC-Cloud to enable a group of mobile devices to efficiently use the cloud computing resources for computation offloading even when the connectivity is varying or intermittent. We design and implement COSMOS to provide scalable computation offloading service to mobile devices at low cost by efficiently managing and allocating cloud computing resources. We design and implement CoAST to allow collaborative application-aware scheduling of mobile traffic to reduce the contention for bandwidth among communication-intensive applications without affecting their user experience.Ph.D