The Case for Context-Aware Resources Management in Mobile Operating Systems
Efficient management of mobile resources from an energy perspective in modern smart-phones is par... more Efficient management of mobile resources from an energy perspective in modern smart-phones is paramount nowadays. Today's mobile phones are equipped with a wide range of sensing, computational, storage and communication resources.
The Case for Context-Aware Resources Management in Mobile Operating Systems
Efficient management of mobile resources from an energy perspective in modern smart-phones is par... more Efficient management of mobile resources from an energy perspective in modern smart-phones is paramount nowadays. Today's mobile phones are equipped with a wide range of sensing, computational, storage and communication resources.
Abstract This demo presents Signposts, a system to provide users with a secure, simple mechanism ... more Abstract This demo presents Signposts, a system to provide users with a secure, simple mechanism to establish and maintain communication channels between their personal cloud of named devices. Signpost names exist in the DNSSEC hierarchy, and resolve to secure end-points when accessed by existing DNS clients. Signpost clients intercept user connection intentions while adding privacy and multipath support.
Abstract In developing regions, Internet connectivity is extremely poor, while mobile phone penet... more Abstract In developing regions, Internet connectivity is extremely poor, while mobile phone penetration is much higher. The inhabitants of developing countries still rely on traditional social mechanisms, such as word-of-mouth, to gather most information that they use in everyday life. In this paper, we propose Goose, a social network service (SNS) architecture for developing regions, which provides services including friend searching, resource sharing and information seeking.
Abstract Access link can often be the bottleneck for application performance. In this paper, we p... more Abstract Access link can often be the bottleneck for application performance. In this paper, we propose to augment wired connections using cellular ones, that we term" 3G onloading (3GOL)". 3GOL utilizes available mobile devices and already-paid-for data volumes to augment and improve performance of applications on wired network. We motivate 3GOL by understanding bottlenecks present in the wired and the cellular networks.
Abstract The intense use of hardware resources by mobile applications has a significant impact on... more Abstract The intense use of hardware resources by mobile applications has a significant impact on the battery life of mobile devices. In this paper we introduce a novel approach for the efficient use of mobile phone resources, by considering the coordinated sharing of resources offered by multiple co-located devices. Taking into account the social behaviour of users, there are frequent situations where similar resources are available by co-located mobile phones.
Access link can often be the bottleneck for application performance. In this paper, we propose to... more Access link can often be the bottleneck for application performance. In this paper, we propose to augment wired connections using cellular ones, that we term "3G onloading (3GOL)". 3GOL utilizes available mobile devices and alreadypaid-for data volumes to augment and improve performance of applications on wired network. We motivate 3GOL by understanding bottlenecks present in the wired and the cellular networks. In order to understand the potential benefits of 3GOL, we conduct active experiments using mobile devices. We show that capacity gains can scale linearly with the number of devices on the downlink while also seeing improvements on the uplink. Using real traces we show how video on demand can benefit with 3GOL, even when volume caps are in place. We design 3GOL as an over the top service, and highlight research challenges.
Mobile phones and tablets can be considered as the first incarnation of the post-PC era. Their exp... more Mobile phones and tablets can be considered as the first incarnation of the post-PC era. Their explosive adoption rate has been driven by a number of factors, with the most signifcant influence being applications (apps) and app markets. Individuals and organizations are able to develop and publish apps, and the most popular form of monetization is mobile advertising.
The mobile advertisement (ad) ecosystem has been the target of prior research, but these works typically focused on a small set of apps or are from a user privacy perspective. In this work we make use of a unique, anonymized data set corresponding to one day of traffic for a major European mobile carrier with more than 3 million subscribers. We further take a principled approach to characterize mobile ad traffic along a number of dimensions, such as overall traffic, frequency, as well as possible implications in terms of energy on a mobile device.
Our analysis demonstrates a number of inefficiencies in today’s ad delivery. We discuss the benefits of well-known techniques, such as pre-fetching and caching, to limit the energy and network signalling overhead caused by current systems. A prototype implementation on Android devices demonstrates an improvement of 50% in terms of energy consumption for offline ad-sponsored apps while limiting the amount of ad related traffic.
Twitter has already become an important facet of the social Web, allowing users and organizations... more Twitter has already become an important facet of the social Web, allowing users and organizations to share their ideas and subscribe to others' updates. Notably, it has been actively used during political events such as the recent elections in Iran, Spain and the USA, or the uprisings in the Middle East, to the extent that it is claimed that revolutions will be tweeted. However such claims are yet to be empirically established. In this work we study an extensive set of millions of tweets themed around the 2011 regional and local elections in Spain and their accompanying civil unrest. Our analysis shows that mainstream political entities were overshadowed on Twitter by grassroots movements discussing alternative points of view, at both regional and national levels. By tracking temporal trends we discover an explosion of interest in the Spanish protests following the establishment of the first protest camps in Madrid. The subsequent spontaneous setting up of similar camps in almost every town in Spain was widely reported at the time, and our spatial analysis quantitatively attests that the protests were indeed widely discussed in all parts of the country. Our results suggest that online social networks serve more as media for interactive engagement between grassroots peers, rather than as platforms for politicians to attract mass attention.
Energy Management Techniques in Modern Mobile Handsets
Managing energy efficiently is paramount in modern smartphones. The diverse range of wireless int... more Managing energy efficiently is paramount in modern smartphones. The diverse range of wireless interfaces and sensors, and the increasing popularity of power-hungry applications that take advantage of these resources can reduce the battery life of mobile handhelds to few hours of operation. The research community, and operating system and hardware vendors found interesting optimisations and techniques to extend the battery life of mobile phones. However, the state of the art of lithium-ion batteries clearly indicates that energy efficiency must be achieved both at the hardware and software level. In this survey, we will cover the software solutions that can be found in the research literature between 1999 and May 2011 at six different levels: energy-aware operating systems, efficient resource management, the impact of users' interaction patterns with mobile devices and applications, wireless interfaces and sensors management, and finally the benefits of integrating mobile devices with cloud computing services.
Despite the advances in battery technologies, mobile phones still suffer from severe energy limit... more Despite the advances in battery technologies, mobile phones still suffer from severe energy limitations. Modern handsets are rich devices that can support multitasking thanks to their high processing power and provide a wide range of resources such as sensors and network interfaces with different energy demands. There have been multiple attempts to characterise those energy demands; both to save or to allocate energy to the applications on the handset. However, there is still little understanding on how the interdependencies between resources (interdependencies caused by the applications and users' behaviour) affect the battery life. In this paper, we demonstrate the necessity of considering all those dynamics in order to characterise the energy demands of the system accurately. These results indicate that simple algorithmic and rulebased scheduling techniques are not the most appropriate way of managing the resources since their usage can be affected by contextual factors, making necessary to find customised solutions that consider each user's behaviour and handset features.
Current mobile handsets are equiped with a wide range of resources from sensors to multiple wirel... more Current mobile handsets are equiped with a wide range of resources from sensors to multiple wireless interfaces. Those resources are ubiquitous by nature and can be replicated at a specific place and time over neighbouring nodes. There are many situations in which accessing resources available in surrounding handsets is efficient in terms of energy and usability (e.g. cellular networks while roaming). However, current operating systems do not facilitate it. This poster introduces ErdOS, a new energy-aware OS paradigm in which mobile handsets can share their resources by exploiting the existing social relationships among the users.
The integration of multiple hardware components available in current smartphones improves their f... more The integration of multiple hardware components available in current smartphones improves their functionality but reduces their battery life to few hours of operation. Despite the positive improvements achieved by hardware and operating system vendors to make mobile platforms more energy eff cient at various levels, we believe that an eff cient power management in mobile devices is compromised by strict layering of the system caused by complex mobile business models that mitigates against cross-layering optimisations. However, there is a lot of room for improvement in the operating system. This paper presents ErdOS, a user-centered energy-aware operating system that extends the battery life of mobile handsets by managing resources proactively and by exploiting opportunistic access to resources in nearby devices using social connections between users.
Uploads
Papers by Narseo Vallina
The mobile advertisement (ad) ecosystem has been the target of prior research, but these works typically focused on a small set of apps or are from a user privacy perspective. In this work we make use of a unique, anonymized data set corresponding to one day of traffic for a major European mobile carrier with more than 3 million subscribers. We further take a principled approach to characterize mobile ad traffic along a number of dimensions, such as overall traffic, frequency, as well as possible implications in terms of energy on a mobile device.
Our analysis demonstrates a number of inefficiencies in today’s ad delivery. We discuss the benefits of well-known techniques, such as pre-fetching and caching, to limit the energy and network signalling overhead caused by current systems. A prototype implementation on Android devices demonstrates an improvement of 50% in terms of energy consumption for offline ad-sponsored apps while limiting the amount of ad related traffic.