Computing while charging

Abstract

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, we 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.