Access Characteristic-Guided Remote Swapping Across Mobile Devices

Memory swapping ensures smooth application switching for mobile systems by caching applications in the background. To further play the role of memory swapping, remote swapping across mobile devices has been widely studied, which caches applications to nearby remote devices by remote paging. However, due to the massive remote I/Os and unguaranteed swap throughput, the current remote swapping is limited with an unsatisfactory user experience, especially under variable network conditions. This paper first studies the access characteristics of applications and clarifies the impact of various network traffic on remote swapping. Motivated by these, an efficient access characteristic-guided remote swapping framework (ACR-Swap⁺) is proposed to optimize remote swapping across mobile devices with resilient remote paging. ACR-Swap⁺ first performs selective remote paging based on the swap-in frequency of different processes and then prefetches data across devices based on the process running states. Finally, it conducts hierarchical remote paging to avoid the impact of network traffic on remote swapping. Evaluations on Google Pixel 6 show that ACR-Swap⁺ reduces the application switching latency by 21.6% and achieves a negligible performance fluctuation under various network traffic compared to the state of the art. © 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).