A novel application data coordinator for mobile computing systems

Recent developments and technological advances in information and communication technologies are leading to an increasing availability and functionality of portable devices, with improved QoS (Quality of Service) of wireless connections together with decreasing costs. As a consequence, the power consumption of the portable device and the required transmission bandwidth are rapidly increasing. This paper proposes a novel architecture named FAST (Fast Application Service Transfer) coordinator, which aims at extending the battery lifetime of portable devices and adaptively regulating the network bandwidth of wireless communications in mobile computing environments. As a coprocessor capable of application-aware transfer acceleration with little involvement of the CPU, the architecture provides a direct and fast interface between the application software and the communication network. This coordinator has been implemented on an FPGA-based prototype platform. Emulation showed that the CPU usage was reduced nearly 90% in the target client system (Atom Z500 processor @800 MHz) by partitioning most of the computing-intensive tasks into the proposed coordinator. Moreover, the transmission data rate was reduced from 9.8Mbps to 2.4Mbps. With these improvements, the FAST coordinator can be widely used in a range of applications, including multimedia service delivery, web browsing, and collaborative computing.