eyeDentify: Multimedia Cyber Foraging from a Smartphone

The recent introduction of smartphones has resulted in an explosion of innovative mobile applications. The computational requirements of many of these applications, however, can not be met by the smartphone itself. The compute power of the smartphone can be enhanced by distributing the application over other compute resources. Existing solutions comprise of a light weight client running on the smartphone and a heavy weight compute server running on, for example, a cloud. This places the user in a dependent position, however, because the user only controls the client application. In this paper, we follow a different model, called cyber foraging, that gives users full control over all parts of the application. We have implemented the model using the Ibis middleware. We evaluate the model using an innovative application in the domain of multimedia computing, and show that cyber foraging increases the application's responsiveness and accuracy whilst decreasing its energy usage.

I. Introduction

In the past 12 months both Google [1] and Microsoft [2] as well as Research In Motion [3], Sony Ericsson [4] and Nokia [5] have opened or announced application stores targeted at smartphone applications. These stores are much like and pushed by the success of the Apple App Store for iPhone applications [6], which already has exceeded 1 billion downloads. The various application stores have rapidly filled with applications that range from the very simple to highly sophisticated ones that make effective use of the available sensors on the smartphone [7], [8].