SymPhoney: a coordinated sensing flow execution engine for concurrent mobile sensing applications

Abstract

Emerging mobile sensing applications are changing the characteristics of smartphone workloads. Whereas typical mobile applications run alone in the foreground interacting with users, sensing applications concurrently run in the background, providing unobtrusive monitoring services. Such concurrent sensing workloads raise a new challenge incurring severe resource contention among themselves and with other foreground applications. To address the challenge, we develop SymPhoney, a coordinated sensing flow execution engine to support concurrent sensing applications. As its key approach, we develop a novel sensing-flow-aware coordination. We first introduce the new concept of frame externalization i.e., to identify and externalize semantic structures embedded in otherwise flat sensing data streams. Leveraging the identified frame structures, SymPhoney develops frame-based coordination and scheduling mechanisms, which effectively coordinates the resource use of concurrent contending applications and maximize their utilities even under severe resource contention. We implemented several sensing applications on top of the SymPhoney engine and performed extensive experiments, showing effective coordination capability of SymPhoney.