MAUI Summary

[Visawee]

Hello Everyone,

Last Tuesday, we discussed the MAUI paper. Below is the summary of it

Energy is the performance bottleneck for today mobile devices because
they are getting faster, they are equipped with more and more sensors,
and they are running more and more energy-hunger applications. One
popular approach to reduce energy consumption in mobile devices is
remote execution. MAUI provides energy saving through fine-grained
code offload, while minimizing the changes required to applications.

In order to use MAUI, users have to denote which methods are safe for
offloading. MAUI automatically identifies which methods to offload on
runtime to safe energy. Then it serializes state information needed
for these methods to the server, and invokes these methods remotely.
These decisions are re-evaluate periodically, to adapt to changing
conditions.

The main components of MAUI are
(1) Proxies : Client proxy and Server proxy together handle the
mechanics of control and data transfer
(2) Profiler : Take charge in profiling program, energy consumption
rate, and network status. It uses these information to produce
annotated call graph for a solver.
(3) Solver : It takes input from profiler and solves the problem
(which method to offload). It uses a linear program solver to find the
optimal partitioning strategy that minimizes the energy consumed by
the smartphone subject to a set of latency constraints.

The authors evaluate MAUI using Macrobenchmarks and Microbenchmarks.
Macrobenchmarks show that MAUI helps smartphones in reducing energy,
improving performance, and bypassing resource limitations.
Microbenchmarks show that MAUI solver works effectively and the delta
approach used in MAUI helps in reducing amount of data transfered to
MAUI servers.

Based on our discussion, we raised some concern about architectural
change of mobile CPU from one core to multiple cores. We had a
conclusion that we might be able to modify the linear programming
(ILP) problem to support the change. Another concern was about the
energy consumption rate of MAUI servers. However, since MAUI’s main
focus is on energy saving on mobile devices, this issue is
negligible.

Thank you,
Visawee Angkanawaraphan