Mobile Computing, Applications, and Services. First International ICST Conference, MobiCASE 2009, San Diego, CA, USA, October 26-29, 2009, Revised Selected Papers

Research Article

Dynamic Migration of Computation through Virtualization of the Mobile Platform

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-12607-9_5,
        author={Shivani Sud and Roy Want and Trevor Pering and Kent Lyons and Barbara Rosario and Michelle Gong},
        title={Dynamic Migration of Computation through Virtualization of the Mobile Platform},
        proceedings={Mobile Computing, Applications, and Services. First International ICST Conference, MobiCASE 2009, San Diego, CA, USA, October 26-29, 2009, Revised Selected Papers},
        proceedings_a={MOBICASE},
        year={2012},
        month={10},
        keywords={Virtualization MIDs Intel® AtomTM processor mobile Virtual Machine (VM) live migration},
        doi={10.1007/978-3-642-12607-9_5}
    }
    
  • Shivani Sud
    Roy Want
    Trevor Pering
    Kent Lyons
    Barbara Rosario
    Michelle Gong
    Year: 2012
    Dynamic Migration of Computation through Virtualization of the Mobile Platform
    MOBICASE
    Springer
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-12607-9_5
Shivani Sud1,*, Roy Want1,*, Trevor Pering1,*, Kent Lyons1,*, Barbara Rosario1,*, Michelle Gong1,*
  • 1: Intel Inc
*Contact email: shivani.a.sud@intel.com, roy.want@intel.com, trevor.pering@intel.com, kent.lyons@intel.com, barbara.rosario@intel.com, michelle.x.gong@intel.com

Abstract

Virtualization and live migration techniques have long been used in the enterprise server space and have been tuned to address data center usages. These capabilities are now expanding to personal computers including desktops and laptops and more recently into smaller mobile devices such as Netbooks and Mobile Internet Devices (MID). Hardware support for virtualization in these platforms, such as that offered by Intel® AtomTM processor, enables the use of existing operating systems and virtualization software. Our experiments demonstrate that live migration can be used to dynamically offload computation to a nearby desktop computer from a Netbook, taking only 25 seconds over a 100Mbps Ethernet network and approximately 100 seconds over an 802.11n interface with a measured throughput of 70Mbps. Additionally, these experiments highlight the limitations of existing virtualization solutions for migrating computation between small form-factor mobile devices and desktop computers which have widely varying resources and processing capabilities. Finally, we discuss the challenges observed in these early experiments and raise key questions that need to be resolved to enable the design of effective systems that support this use model.