Numerical simulations on mobile devices are an important tool for engineers and decision makers in the field. However, providing simulation results on mobile devices is challenging due to the complexity of the simulation, requiring remote server resources and distributed mobile computation. The additional large size of multi-dimensional simulation results leads to the insufficient performance of existing approaches, especially when the bandwidth of wireless communication is scarce. In this article, we present an optimized novel approach utilizing surrogate models and data assimilation techniques to reduce the communication overhead. Evaluations show that our approach is up to 6.5 times faster than streaming results from the server while still meeting required quality constraints.

Currently, various hardware and software companies are developing augmented reality devices, most prominently Microsoft with its Hololens. Besides gaming, such devices can be used for serious pervasive applications, like interactive mobile simulations to support engineers in the field. Interactive simulations have high demands on resources, which the mobile device alone is unable to satisfy. Therefore, we propose a framework to support mobile simulations by distributing the computation between mobile device and a remote server. For the computation of parameter-dependent solutions of the simulation, we use the reduced basis method, which allows to drastically reduce the computation time and energy consumption. We present three approaches for the distributed execution of the reduced basis method between mobile device and server. Evaluations show that we can speed-up the numerical computation to over 131 times while using 73 times less energy compared to offloading everything to a server.

Recently, a new class of mobile applications has appeared that takes into account the behavior of physical phenomenon. Prominent examples of such applications include augmented reality applications visualizing physical processes on a mobile device or mobile cyber-physical systems like autonomous vehicles or robots. Typically, these applications need to solve partial differential equations (PDE) to simulate the behavior of a physical system. There are two basic strategies to numerically solve these PDEs: (1) offload all computations to a remote server, (2) solve the PDE on the resource-constrained mobile device. However, both strategies have severe drawbacks. Offloading will fail if the mobile device is disconnected, and resource constraints require to reduce the quality of the solution. Therefore, we propose a new approach for mobile simulations using a hybrid strategy that is robust to communication failures and can still benefit from powerful server resources. The basic idea of this approach is to dynamically decide on the placement of the PDE solver based on a prediction of the wireless link availability using Markov Chains. Our tests based on measurement in real cellular networks and real mobile devices show that this approach is able to keep deadline constraints in more than 61 % of the cases compared to a pure offloading approach, while saving up to 74 % of energy compared to a simplified approach.

While location-based services are already well established in outdoor scenarios, they are still not available in indoor environments. The reason for this can be found in two open problems: First, there is still no off-the-shelf indoor positioning system for mobile devices and, second, indoor maps are not publicly available for most buildings. While there is an extensive body of work on the first problem, the efficient creation of indoor maps remains an open challenge. We tackle the indoor mapping challenge in our MapGENIE approach that automatically derives indoor maps from traces collected by pedestrians moving around in a building. Since the trace data is collected in the background from the pedestrians' mobile devices, MapGENIE avoids the labor-intensive task of traditional indoor map creation and increases the efficiency of indoor mapping. To enhance the map building process, MapGENIE leverages exterior information about the building and uses grammars to encode structural information about the building. Hence, in contrast to existing work, our approach works without any user interaction and only needs a small amount of traces to derive the indoor map of a building. To demonstrate the performance of MapGENIE, we implemented our system using Android and a foot-mounted IMU to collect traces from volunteers. We show that using our grammar approach, compared to a purely trace-based approach we can identify up to four times as many rooms in a building while at the same time achieving a consistently lower error in the size of detected rooms.