Balancing performance, energy, and quality in pervasive computing

We describe Spectra, a remote execution system for battery-powered clients used in pervasive computing. Spectra enables applications to combine the mobility of small devices with the greater processing power of static compute servers. Spectra is self-tuning: it monitors both application resource usage and the availability of resources in the environment, and dynamically determines how and where to execute application components. In making this determination, Spectra balances the competing goals of performance, energy conservation, and application quality. We have validated Spectra's approach on the Compaq Itsy v2.2 and IBM ThinkPad 560X using a speech recognizer a document preparation system, and a natural language translator. Our results confirm that Spectra almost always selects the best execution plan, and that its few suboptimal choices are very close to optimal.