Abstract
Mobile devices can improve performance and preserve energy by offloading computational intensive calculations to nearby peers, as well as Internet-accessible servers. However, despite a long research history, current peer-to-peer offloading technologies are dilatory and unfit for applications that require rapidly consecutive requests over short periods, particularly for mobile apps. This paper introduces INGRIM, (i.e., Inter-group Remote Invocation Middleware), which is a library-based middleware system that can eliminate much of the complexity associated with implementing, testing, and operating systems with peer-to-peer offloading. Specifically, INGRIM provides annotations for declaring distribution decisions and out-of-box components that enable peer-to-peer communications, even when a client app and the service provider do not have a direct network link or Internet connectivity. This paper shows that INGRIM's overhead is similar to RMI, but that it can support inter-group communications.