Enabling Mobile Device Coordination over Distributed Shared Memory
Maosen Huang, Hengfeng Wei, Yu Huang · 2016
Distributed shared memory-based coordination has the advantage of simplifying the coordination logic to read/write operations over the illusionary local memory. However, it is notoriously challenging to come up with a cost-effective implementation of the distributed shared memory. The implementation becomes more challenging in mobile environments, due to the resource constraints and the more rapid changes in the computing context. To this end, we propose the Mobile Distributed Shared Memory (MDSM) middleware to facilitate the development of mobile coordination applications. The key constructs in the shared memory are shared registers. Shared registers with different read/write patterns are implemented to facilitate flexible coordination. The registers also have different consistency semantics, to enable efficient tradeoff between data consistency and data access cost. An application framework is proposed to simplify the implementation of mobile coordination, relying on the middleware support from MDSM. A case study is conducted to demonstrate the usage of MDSM, where a soccer game application for the mobile phone is developed. Experimental evaluation is conducted to quantify different options of the consistency-latency tradeoff in the case study. The performance measurements show the cost-effectiveness of eventual consistency in this game. We also verify the read/write traces to further explain why eventual consistency practically performs better than it can guarantee.