Rio: A System Solution for Sharing I/O between Mobile Systems

TL;DR

Rio is a system that enables sharing of various I/O devices like cameras and sensors across mobile devices, supporting unmodified applications and reducing development effort for new device types.

Contribution

The paper introduces Rio, a novel I/O sharing system for mobile devices that supports multiple device classes and cross-device sharing with minimal engineering effort.

Findings

Rio supports four I/O classes with minimal code

Achieves near-local I/O performance for audio, sensors, and modems

Experiences performance issues with camera due to network limitations

Abstract

Mobile systems are equipped with a diverse collection of I/O devices, including cameras, microphones, sensors, and modems. There exist many novel use cases for allowing an application on one mobile system to utilize I/O devices from another. This paper presents Rio, an I/O sharing solution that supports unmodified applications and exposes all the functionality of an I/O device for sharing. Rio's design is common to many classes of I/O devices, thus significantly reducing the engineering effort to support new I/O devices. Our implementation of Rio on Android consists of 6700 total lines of code and supports four I/O classes with fewer than 450 class-specific lines of code. Rio also supports I/O sharing between mobile systems of different form factors, including smartphones and tablets. We show that Rio achieves performance close to that of local I/O for audio, sensors, and modems, but suffers noticeable performance degradation for camera due to network throughput limitations between the two systems, which is likely to be alleviated by emerging wireless standards.