Remote Intent Service: Supporting Transparent Task-Oriented Collaboration for Mobile Devices

Platform support for mobile collaboration among multiple smart devices has been an active research issues in the computing community. Using platform-level collaboration functionalities, a mobile device can share its resources, I/O events, and even apps easily with other devices, which enables developing a new kind of application that runs across multiple devices. In this work, we further extend the collaboration functionalities in mobile platforms by developing a novel platform service, remote intent service (RIS),which enables a running application in a device to outsource the execution of a specific task to another application in a remote device. Using the remote intent service, for example, we can view an attached document to an email, using a document viewer application in a remote device that has a larger screen, or conveniently browse an audio file that exists on another mobile device and play it locally. We implemented the remote intent service to the Android platform and measured the latency for executing such tasks in a remote device. The experimental results confirm that the remote intent service, for sending the intent plus retrieving the result, incurs an additional delay of less than 250 ms in total, and thus, it is practical.