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Computer Science @ Rochester
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
11:00 AM
Computer Studies Bldg. Room 703
Ph.D. Thesis Proposal
Amal Fahad
University of Rochester
A Low-Power Active Gateway for Web Services
Abstract: Internet-based applications become widespread nowadays due to several reasons, such as data availability, work offloading from power-hungry devices, and content transformation for special-need devices. These applications usually run in a server/client model where the server side is hosted on a dedicated machine and responds to clients’ requests. In order to avoid the network-condition effects on these applications’ performance and to guarantee their high performance, the server side usually runs on multiple machines that consume high power, a few hundred of Watts each on today’s technology.

In this work we evaluate the feasibility and performance of a low-power (a few Watts), wireless active gateway in servicing concurrent client requests of realistic web applications. Results show that the I/O-intensive Squid web caching can be well-supported on the low-power platform, with comparable performance and an order of magnitude better energy efficiency compared to Squid running on a conventional machine. On the other hand, the two computation-intensive services we tested, WebAnywhere that supports enhanced human-computer interaction and Feng-Office that offers documents- editing and sharing, may lead to excessively long delays when hosted solely on our low- power active gateway. We further propose new ideas for: load management to offload excessive load at a node into a remote or nearby execution site(s), information sharing among neighbour nodes using the broadcasting nature of the wireless network, and using power management policies to achieve a fine-grain power-proportionality across nodes.

This work contributes to significant energy saving in the Internet-based information technology and consequently improves the sustainability of computing.