Swing: Swarm Computing For Mobile Sensing

This paper presents Swing, a framework that aggregates a swarm of mobile devices to perform collaborative computation on sensed data streams. It endows performance and efficiency to the new generation of mobile sensing applications, in which the computation is overly intensive for a single device. After studying the source of performance slowdown of the sensing applications on a single device, we design and implement Swing to manage (i) parallelism in stream processing, (ii) dynamism from mobile users, and (iii) heterogeneity from the swarm devices. We build an Android-based prototype and deploy sensing apps - face recognition and language translation - on a wireless testbed. Our evaluations show that with proper management policies, such a distributed processing framework can achieve up to 2.7x improvement in throughput and 6.7x reduction in latency, allowing intensive sensing apps to reach real-time performance goals under different device usages, network conditions and user mobility.