Overview

The collective and collaborative use of ever connected and pervasive mobile devices has been increasingly sought not only for apparent multiplayer mobile games, but also distributed processing. Despite a rich set of resources in today’s mobile devices, the platform level support for mobile collaboration is limited. The current model of mobile “collaboration” requires each device to install a particular, ‘full’ mobile app for a respective collaboration. In this paper, we present Single Application Multiple Device (SAMD) as a novel mobile collaboration framework. SAMD significantly facilitates such collaboration by enabling (heterogeneous) mobile devices to be harnessed for a common objective without installing an app in advance. In particular, SAMD enables devices, agreed to participate in a collaboration, to run portions of the app on-the-fly. To achieve this, we have developed three solutions as core functionalities of SAMD:
1) controller packaging
2) lookahead transfer
3) code adaptation.
While SAMD’s design is platform independent, we have implemented SAMD on Android as a proof-of-concept prototype. Our experimental results demonstrate SAMD is capable of providing fine-grained application sharing with reasonable overhead.