Using satellite execution to reduce latency for mobile/cloud applications

Abstract

We demonstrate a practical way to reduce latency for mobile .NET applications that interact with cloud services, without disrupting application architectures. We provide a programming abstraction for location-independent code, which has the potential to execute either locally or at a satellite execution environment in the cloud, where other cloud services can be accessed with low latency. This maintains a simple deployment model, but gives applications the option to offload latency-sensitive code to the cloud. Services like cloud databases can still be accessed programmatically, but with less concern for the aggregated latency of consecutively-issued requests. Our evaluation shows that this approach can significantly improve the response time for applications that execute dependent database queries, and that the required cloud-side resources are modest.