COMET: Supporting seamless multi-device interaction through app component distribution

초록

The proliferation of mobile and IoT devices has sparked growing interest in multi-device interaction, where a single app operates across multiple devices to leverage their diverse capabilities. However, the current methods of app development and usage remain bound to a single-device paradigm, rendering multi-device apps difficult to implement and deploy. This paper presents COMET, a novel mobile app framework that enables the dynamic distribution of app components across multiple devices at runtime, supporting a wide range of multi-device scenarios, including collaborative applications, smart environments, and interactions across heterogeneous personal devices. COMET enables developers to specify distributable components using lightweight annotations and employs build-time code instrumentation to automate the deployment and execution of selected components onto remote devices. This approach supports multi-device interaction with minimal developer effort and without requiring system-level modifications. To realize this, COMET addresses four key challenges: (i) the static partitioning of app components and extraction of their dependencies at build time, (ii) efficient execution of these components on remote devices, (iii) preservation of intercomponent communication across devices, and (iv) synchronization of distributed components that share a global state. We implemented a prototype of COMET on Android and evaluated it using real-world apps. Our evaluation with eight case-study apps shows that component distribution completes within 251.8 ms. A user study with 15 participants further demonstrates that COMET provides intuitive multi-device interaction with acceptable responsiveness.

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