Energy-Aware Mobile Service Overlays: Cooperative Dynamic Power Management in Distributed Mobile Systems

With their increasingly powerful computational resources and high-speed wireless communications, future mobile systems will have the ability to run sophisticated applications on collections of cooperative end devices. Mobility, however, requires dynamic management of these platforms' distributed resources, and such management can also be used to meet application quality requirements and prolong application lifetimes, the latter by best using available energy resources. This paper presents energy-aware mobile service overlays (MSOs), a set of mechanisms and associated policies for running mobile applications across multiple, cooperating machines while actively performing power management to extend system usability lifetimes. MSO policies manage energy consumption by (i) allocating application components to available nodes based upon their current energy capacities and resource availabilities, (ii) monitoring for, and responding to changes in energy and resource characteristics, and (iii) dynamically exploiting energy-performance tradeoffs in over provisioned situations. Coupled with mobility, such cooperation enables multiple mobile platforms to bring their joint resources to bear on complex application tasks, providing significant benefits to application lifetimes and performance. Evaluations of MSOs on a MANET computing testbed indicate an extension in system lifetime of up to 10% for an example application.