COSC7388: Advanced Distributed Computing: Mobile Computing Riding on the Cloud

Instructors:	Rong Zheng
Email:	rzheng (at) cs.uh.edu
Lectures	Wed 4 - 7pm in PGH 232
Office Hours:	M 2:30pm - 6:00pm
Class web site:	http://www2.cs.uh.edu/~rzheng/course/COSC7388sp11

Prerequisites: Algorithms, computer networks, C/C++ programming

Synopsis:

With the prevalence of wireless technologies and broadband access, mobile devices have become an essential part of everyday life. According to a recent survey, the number of mobile phones per user has risen to 1.8 . While mobile technologies have advanced significantly in processing capability, battery life time, display and user interfaces, they alone cannot meet the processing and storage requirements of more sophisticated applications. Cloud computing on the other hand holds the promises of complimenting mobile technology in those aspects. This course covers topics on mobile computing and cloud computing with focus the synergy between the two. It will consist of three components:

Lectures on the essentials of mobile and cloud computing
Student presentation and paper critiques on recent papers and results in this area
Semester long projects on utilizing mobile technology and cloud computing resources to address problems of pertinent needs and societal impact. In partnership with Microsoft Research, students will form groups to carry the projects with access to both hardware and software resources including:

Windows 7 phones
Development SDK, to develop WP7 based cloud-enabled mobile applications
Access to several cloud services developed by Microsoft Research (e.g. Relay service, OCR, Speech-To-Text)
Free access to Azure compute and store services
Sample code and application development instructions.
Access to the Hawaii community forum (via Hawaii website: http://research.microsoft.com/hawaii)

Through a selected set of papers and whitepapers, students will acquire an understanding of requirements and state-of-the-art practices with the hand-on opportunities to turn ideas to demonstrable software "products". A secondary objective of this course is to prepare students with good technical oral and written presentation skills.

Grading

The course would consist of lectures, paper critique (20pt) and presentation (20pt), a survey report (20pt) and a semester long project (40pt). The first three parts are graded individually. Late submissions are subjected to 10pt (on the scale of 100pt) penalty per day unless announced otherwise.

Tentative schedule:

Date	Topic	Misc	Presenter
Jan 19^th	Introduction to mobile computing	lecture1
Jan 26th	Introduction to cloud computing	lecture 2
Feb 2nd	Microsoft Mobile 7/Azure tutorial	slides code
Feb 9th	Mobile applications	presentation, project discussion	CenceMe (Sushil), xShare (Pallavi)
Feb 16th	Cloud platform & programming	presentation	Virtualization (Jay), Dynamo (Eshwar)
Feb 23rd	Project proposal
March 2nd	Mobile applications	presentation	VTrack(Seif), AndWellness (Hien)
March 9th	Cloud platform & programming	presentation	Huy, Darshan
March 16th	Spring break
March 23rd	Security & privacy in Mobile computing	Lecture
March 30th	Guest lecture	Lecture
April 6th	Security & privacy in Mobile computing	Presentation	Huy, privacy (Pallavi)
April 13th	Cloud service & resource management	Lecture	Nectar (Hien), opt (Eshwar)
April 20th	Cloud service & resource management	presentation	depot (Sushil), donarDarshan
April 27th	Enablers for Mobile Computing	presentation	Seif
May 4^th	Final project presentation

Project:

Eshwar Rohit, Hien Nguyen, Sushil Joshi, "QUEST7: A real life search agent" ( Best Project Award)
Huy Nguyen, Pallavi Arora, "SIP: Secure Information Provider Framework for Mobile Phone Users"
Darshan Modani, Seif Eldrasi, "Determine car fuel consumption using mobile phones"

Survey reports:

Eshwar Rohit, Hien Nguyen, Sushil Josh, Darshan Modani, Seif Eldrasi, Mobile Computing in Healthcare
Huy Nguyen, Mobile Social Network and Its Open Research Problems
Pallavi Arora, Privacy in location based services

Reading list:

Introduction to Cloud computing

[Hayes08a] Hayes, Brian, Cloud computing, Commun. ACM, Vol. 51, No. 7, pp. 9--11, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2008. [PDF]
[Bcloud] Armbrust, Michael, Fox, Armando, Griffith, Rean, Joseph, Anthony D., Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing, feb. 10, 2009. [PDF]
[cloudresearch] Greenberg, Albert, Hamilton, James, Maltz, David A., Patel, Parveen, The cost of a cloud: research problems in data center networks, SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 68--73, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2009. [PDF]

Cloud Platforms and Programming

[mapreduce] Jeffrey Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters, OSDI'04: Proceedings of the 6th conference on Symposium on Opearting Systems Design \& Implementation, pp. 10--10, USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2004. [PDF] (Huy)
[dynamo] DeCandia, Giuseppe, Hastorun, Deniz, Jampani, Madan, Kakulapati, Gunavardhan, Lakshman, Avinash, Pilchin, Alex, Sivasubramanian, Swaminathan, Vosshall, Peter, Vogels, Werner, Dynamo: amazon's highly available key-value store, SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev., Vol. 41, No. 6, pp. 205--220, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2007. [PDF] (Eshwar)
[virtualization] Debashis Basak, Rohit Toshniwal, Serge Maskalik, and Allwyn Sequeira. 2010. Virtualizing networking and security in the cloud. SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 44, 4 (December 2010), 86-94. [PDF] (Jay)
[cloudcmp] Ang Li, Xiaowei Yang, Srikanth Kandula, and Ming Zhang, CloudCmp: Comparing Public Cloud Providers, IMC'10: Internet Measurement Conference, Melbourne, Australia, 2010. [PDF](Darshan)

Cloud Services and Resource Management

[volley] Sharad Agarwal, John Dunagan, Navendu Jain, Stefan Saroiu, Alec Wolman, and Habinder Bhogan, Volley: Automated Data Placement for Geo-Distributed Cloud Services. NSDI'10: 7th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, USENIX, San Jose, CA, 2010 [PDF]
*[opt] Zheng Zhang, Ming Zhang, Albert Greenberg, Y. Charlie Hu, Ratul Mahajan, and Blaine Christian, Optimizing Cost and Performance in Online Service Provider Networks, NSDI'10: 7th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, USENIX, San Jose, CA, 2010 [PDF] (Eshwar)
[donar] Patrick Wendell, Joe Wenjie Jiang, Michael J. Freedman, and Jennifer Rexford, DONAR: Decentralized Server Selection for Cloud Services, In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2010 conference on SIGCOMM (SIGCOMM '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 231-242 [PDF] (Darshan)
*[depot] Prince Mahajan, Srinath Setty, Sangmin Lee, Allen Clement, Lorenzo Alvisi, Mike Dahlin, and Michael Walfish, Depot: Cloud Storage with Minimal Trust, OSDI 2010, Vancouver, BC, Canada, October, 2010 [PDF] (Sushil)
*[nectar] Pradeep Kumar Gunda, Lenin Ravindranath, Chandramohan A. Thekkath, Yuan Yu, and Li Zhuang, Nectar: Automatic Management of Data and Computation in Datacenters, OSDI 2010, Vancouver, BC, Canada, October, 2010 [PDF] (Hien)
[cloudsecurity] Thomas Ristenpart, Eran Tromer, Hovav Shacham, and Stefan Savage. 2009. Hey, you, get off of my cloud: exploring information leakage in third-party compute clouds. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security (CCS '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 199-212. [PDF]

Introduction to Mobile Computing

[mobilechallenges] Satyanarayanan, M., Fundamental challenges in mobile computing, PODC '96: Proceedings of the fifteenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing, pp. 1--7, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1996. [PDF]
[ubicomp] Mark Weiser, Some computer science issues in ubiquitous computing. Commun. ACM 36, 7 (July 1993), 75-84 [PDF]

Mobile Computing Applications

*[AndWellness] Hicks, J., Ramanathan, N., Kim, D., Monibi, M., Selsky, J., Hansen, M., Estrin, D., AndWellness: An Open Mobile System for Activity and Experience Sampling, In proceedings of Wireless Health 2010: Academic and Research Conference, La Jolla, CA, October 5-7, 2010. [PDF] (Hien)
[building] D. Jung and A. Savvides, Estimating Building Consumption Breakdowns using ON/OFF State Sensing and Incremental Sub-Meter Deployment, to appear in the proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, SenSys, Zurich, Switzerland, November 3-5, 2010, [PDF]

vtrack

VTrack: Accurate, Energy-Aware Road Traffic Delay Estimation Using Mobile Phones

PDF

*[CenceMe] Miluzzo, Emiliano, Lane, Nicholas D., Fodor, Krist\'of, Peterson, Ronald, Lu, Hong, Musolesi, Mirco, Eisenman, Shane B., Zheng, Xiao, Campbell, Andrew T., Sensing meets mobile social networks: the design, implementation and evaluation of the CenceMe application, SenSys '08: Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Embedded network sensor systems, pp. 337--350, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2008. [PDF] (Sushil)
[xShare] Liu, Yunxin, Rahmati, Ahmad, Huang, Yuanhe, Jang, Hyukjae, Zhong, Lin, Zhang, Yongguang, Zhang, Shensheng, xShare: supporting impromptu sharing of mobile phones, Mobisys '09: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services, pp. 15--28, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2009. [PDF] (Pallavi)

Enablers for Mobile Computing

[datavault] M. Mun, S. Hao, N. Mishra, K. Shilton, J. Burke, D. Estrin, M. Hansen, R. Govindan, Personal Data Vaults: A Locus of Control for Personal Data Streams, In Proceedings of The 6rd International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT) 2010, Philadelphia, PA, November 30, 2010. [PDF]
[jigsaw] Hong Lu, Jun Yang, Zhigang Liu, Nicholas D. Lane, Tanzeem Choudhury, Andrew T. Campbell, The Jigsaw Continuous Sensing Engine for Mobile Phone Applications. 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2010), Zurich, Switzerland November 3-5, 2010. [PDF]
*[appperf] Junxian Huang, Qiang Xu, Birjodh Tiwana, Z. Morley Mao, Ming Zhang, Victor Bahl, Anatomizing Application Performance Differences on Smartphones, Mobisys 2010 [PDF | Slides]
[context-for-wireless] Rahmati, Ahmad, Zhong, Lin, Context-for-wireless: context-sensitive energy-efficient wireless data transfer, MobiSys '07: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services, pp. 165--178, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2007. [PDF]
[cuckoo] Roelof Kemp, Nick Palmer, Thilo Kielmann, and Henri E. Bal: Cuckoo: a Computation Offloading Framework for Smartphones, 2nd Int. Conf. on Mobile Computing, Applications, and Services (MobiCASE 2010), Santa Clara, CA, October 25-28, 2010. [PDF] (Seif)
*[MVM] Ken Barr, Prashanth Bungale, Stephen Deasy, Viktor Gyuris, Perry Hung, Craig Newell, Harvey Tuch, and Bruno Zoppis. 2010. The VMware mobile virtualization platform: is that a hypervisor in your pocket?. SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 44, 4 (December 2010), 124-135. [PDF]