Exploring Potential and Feasibility of Binary Code Sharing in Mobile Computing

While tremendous growing mobile apps offer users rich services and functionalities, they also bring significant performance and energy issues. Code sharing is promising to address these issues, but existing application-level code sharing is rather restrictive. This paper develops the a transparent machine code sharing for mobile devices, and presents its design, implementation, and deployment. SnapCode enables machine code sharing across a wide variety of commercial off-the-shelf Android devices. By sharing and running machine code, SnapCode can offer significant speed-ups: an average speed-up of 9.9X for one-time trial apps, and up to 120X in apps’ regular uses. In addition, it can save more than 80 percent energy consumption.