cMobiDesk: A Lightweight Solution for Android Desktop Virtualization

Mobile devices have become an important aspect of people's daily lives and increased the popularity of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). However, there exist many problems in BYOD. First, it is complex and expensive for companies to make the applications and tools general across all platforms. Second, a large amount of companies' computing resources is wasted. Thus, researchers proposed Virtual Mobile Infrastructure (VMI). However, existing VMI solutions still have the following limitations: 1) They run server instances in virtual machines, leading to high overhead. 2) They need to modify the source code of the mobile OS running on the server, introducing maintainability and compatibility concerns. To address the above problems, we propose a new lightweight VMI solution named cMobiDesk. cMobiDesk employs Linux Container (LXC) to build multiple Android containers with low overhead on a single physical machine. Then, we design and implement a prototype system of cMobiDesk without modifying the source code of the mobile OS by leveraging a non-invasive method. The experiments show that the cMobiDesk has higher performance and lower overhead than the state-of-the-art.