Prof. Gustavo Alonso and co-authors receive ACM/IFIP/Usenix International Middleware Conference 2019 Test-of-Time Award

The annual Middleware conference is a major forum for the discussion of innovations and recent scientific advances of middleware systems with a focus on the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of distributed systems, platforms and architectures for computing, storage, and communication.

Paper abstract:

Mobile phones are set to become the universal interface to online services and cloud computing applications. However, using them for this purpose today is limited to two configurations: applications either run on the phone or run on the server and are remotely accessed by the phone. These two options do not allow for a customised and flexible service interaction, limiting the possibilities for performance optimisation as well. In this paper, we present a middleware platform that can automatically distribute different layers of an application between the phone and the server, and optimise a variety of objective functions (latency, data transferred, cost, etc.).

Our approach builds on existing technology for distributed module management and does not require new infrastructures. In the paper, we discuss how to model applications as a consumption graph, and how to process it with a number of novel algorithms to find the optimal distribution of the application modules. The application is then dynamically deployed on the phone in an efficient and transparent manner. We have tested and validated our approach with extensive experiments and with two different applications. The results indicate that the techniques we propose can significantly optimise the performance of cloud applications when used from mobile phones.