Energy-aware resource sharing with mobile devices

Sharing ad hoc resources by offering remote services through an appropriate infrastructure enables new applications for mobile devices. However, the willingness of device owners to contribute resources to such applications remains low as long as they cannot control the amount of energy spent in sharing. In this paper, we explore the potential, limitations, and tradeoffs of ad hoc resource sharing in a mobile context from an energy perspective. We show by a simulation that the battery lifetime of participating devices can be extended up to 27% beyond a random service selection through the use of appropriate service selection policies that take into account the energy cost of a requested service. Motivated by these results, we present a framework for energy-aware resource sharing that consists of a generic energy estimator for forecasting the energy consumption of a remote service call. The estimator can be customized easily for a specific platform by solving a linear equation system with coefficients derived from benchmark measurements. We present an exemplary case study of this for the Nokia N810 platform and show by extensive experiments that the average estimation error is below 5% for 88% of the service calls. Furthermore, measurements conducted with a prototype implementation of the resource sharing framework show that battery lifetime can in fact be extended by energy-aware service selection policies.