Application characteristics-aware disk and network I/O management on Android platform

Abstract

The last several years have seen a rapid increase in smart phone use. Android offers an open-source software platform on smart phones, that includes a Linux-based kernel, Java applications, and middleware. The Android middleware provides system libraries and services to facilitate the development of performance-sensitive or device-specific functionalities, such as screen display, multimedia, and web browsing. Android keeps track of which applications make use of which system services for some pre-defined functionalities, and which application is running in the foreground attracting the user`s attention. Such information is valuable in capturing application characteristics and can be useful for resource management tailored to application requirements. However, the Linux-based Android kernel does not utilize such information for I/O resource management. This paper is the first work, to the best of our knowledge, to attempt to understand application characteristics through Android architecture and to incorporate those characteristics into disk and network I/O management. Our proposed approach, Aciom (Application Characteristics-aware I/O Management), requires no modification to applications and characterizes application I/O requests as time-sensitive, bursty, or plain, depending on which system services are involved and which application receives the user`s focus. Aciom then provides differentiated I/O management services for different types of I/O requests, supporting minimum bandwidth reservations for time-sensitive requests and placing maximum bandwidth limits on bursty requests. We present the design of Aciom and a prototype implementation on Android. Our experimental results show that Aciom is quite effective in handling disk and network I/O requests in support of time-sensitive applications in the presence of bursty I/O requests.