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ZTE Communications ›› 2011, Vol. 9 ›› Issue (1): 9-14.

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Mirroring Smartphones for Good: A Feasibility Study

Bo Zhao1, Zhi Xu1, Caixia Chi2, Sencun Zhu1, and Guohong Cao1   

  1. 1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University;
    2. Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent Technologies
  • Online:2011-03-25 Published:2011-03-25
  • About author:Bo Zhao (bzhao@cse.psu.edu) is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University. He received his B.S. degree in computer science from the Peking University in 2003. His research interests include 3G network security, power saving of the telecom networks, and 3G network services.

    Zhi Xu (zux103@cse.psu.edu) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University. He received an M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Ottawa in 2007 and a B.Eng. degree from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2004. His research interests include mobile network security and online social network security.

    Caixia Chi (chic@alcatel-lucent.com) is a researcher at Bell Labs. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Applied Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2000. Her research focuses on optical network, network modeling and optimization, algorithm design, and graph theory.

    Sencun Zhu (szhu@cse.psu.edu) is an associate professor in Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Information Technology from George Mason University in 2004, an M.S. degree from University of Science and Technology of China in 1999, and a B.S. degree from Tsinghua University, China in 1996. His research interests include network and systems security, software security, and social network security.

    Guohong Cao (gcao@cse.psu.edu) received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Ohio State University. Since then, he has been with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University, where he is currently a professor. His research interests include wireless networks and mobile computing. He has published over one hundred papers in the areas of sensor networks, wireless network security, data dissemination, resource management, and distributed fault-tolerant computing. He has served on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and has served on the program committee of many conferences. He was a recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2001. He is a fellow of the IEEE.

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Abstract: An increasing number of applications and functions are being introduced into smartphones, but smartphones have limited computation ability and battery resources. To enhance smartphone capacity, cloud computing and virtualization techniques can be used to shift the workload from smartphone to computational infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a new framework in which a mirror is kept for each smartphone on a computing infrastructure in the telecom network. With mirrors, the workload can be greatly reduced, and smartphone resources can be virtually expanded. The feasibility of deploying this framework in telecom networks is demonstrated in the protocol design, a synchronization study, and a scalability test. Two applications are introduced to show how computational workload on the smartphone and traffic in the telecom network are significantly reduced using our techniques.

Key words: mirror, cloud computing, smartphone