Computing While Charging: Building a Distributed Computing Infrastructure Using Smartphones
Every night, a large number of idle Smartphones are plugged into a power source for recharging the battery. Given the increasing computing capabilities of Smartphones, these idle phones constitute a sizeable computing infrastructure. Therefore, for an enterprise which supplies its employees with Smartphones, the authors argue that a computing infrastructure that leverages idle Smartphones being charged overnight is an energy-efficient and cost-effective alternative to running tasks on traditional server infrastructure. While parallel execution and scheduling models exist for servers (e.g., MapReduce), Smartphones present a unique set of technical challenges due to the heterogeneity in CPU clock speed, variability in network bandwidth, and lower availability compared to servers.