Title: Establishing Trust and Saving Energy in Computation Offloading
Speaker: Prof. Yung-Hsiang Lu, Purdue University
Time: 11am, May 27 (Wed), 2009
Place: Room 111, CSIE building

Abstract:

Handheld mobile devices (such as phones and PDAs) have become primary computing platforms.  These devices have limited battery energy, processor performance, and memory.  Meanwhile, wireless networks are widely available and allow the mobile devices to connect to high-performance grid-powered servers.  These mobile devices may send complex computation to the servers for better performance and lower energy consumption. This is called "computation offloading."  The servers may charge the mobile devices' users for the services.  The mobile devices have to trust the computation results from the servers. However, it is possible that the servers return random results and still charge the users.

This presentation will explain some recently developed techniques for mobile devices to detect whether severs have indeed performed the computation as claimed.  We instrument the offloaded programs and embed additional information as checkpoints that are executed at the servers.  When the results are returned from the severs, the mobile devices compare the values of the checkpoints to determine whether the servers have executed the offloaded programs.  We evaluate the trade-offs between confidence and overhead in performance and mobile devices' energy consumption.

Short Biography:

陸永祥 Yung-Hsiang Lu is an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. His research focuses on energy management for computer systems, mobile robots, and sensor networks.  In 2004, he obtained an NSF Career Award for studying energy management by operating systems.   He received Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, California, USA in 2002.  He is a senior member of the IEEE and the ACM, and a member of the Low Power Technical Committee of ACM SIGDA.