Network-Assisted Wireless Computing

Multimedia applications for mobile devices are increasing and growing more sophisticated. Many of these applications require computationally intensive processing, such as image processing, source coding, feature extraction and feature matching. If all of this processing were performed on the mobile device, its limited battery supply would quickly deplete. However, if the request must be transmitted through a network and processed at a remote Application Server large delays may be incurred due to communication latency - especially if the original size of the request message is very large. In this paper, the authors propose the use of mid-network processing on intermediary nodes in a multistage tandem network. They refer to this as "Wireless Network-Assisted Computing".