LinkShare: device-centric control for concurrent and continuous mobile-cloud interactions

Mobile applications have become increasingly sophisticated. Emerging cognitive assistance applications can involve multiple computationally intensive modules working continuously and concurrently, further straining the already limited resources on these mobile devices. While computation offloading to the edge or the cloud is still the de facto solution, existing approaches are limited by intra-application operations only or edge-/cloud-centric scheduling. Instead, we argue that operating system level coordination is needed on the mobile side to adequately support the prospects of multi-application offloading. Specifically, both the local mobile system resource and the network bandwidth to reach the cloud need to be allocated intelligently among concurrent offloading jobs.

In this paper, we build a system-level scheduler service, LinkShare, that wraps over the operating system scheduler to coordinate among multiple offloading requests. We further study the scheduling requirements and suitable metrics, and find that the most intuitive approaches of minimizing the end-to-end processing time or earliest-deadline first scheduling do not work well. Instead, LinkShare adopts earliest-deadline first with limited sharing (EDF-LS), that balances real-time requirements and fairness. Extensive evaluation of an Android implementation of LinkShare shows that adding this additional scheduler is essential, and that EDF-LS reduces the deadline miss events by up to 30% compared to the baseline.