The deployment of shared data objects among handheld and wearable devices

With the great success on making phones smarter, vendors now plan on replicating the same idea on wearable accessories. Accordingly, applications on these devices are full of new possibilities to interact with users. However, in order to provide consistent user experience, it poses a major challenge on how to efficiently deploy shared application states among the devices. In this paper, we consider to minimize the data transmission latencies between the processes and the shared data objects on a set of mobile devices with distributed shared memory. The problem is proved to be NP-hard. Nevertheless, efficient solutions can still be obtained when special cases are considered. On one hand, we propose a polynomial-time optimal algorithm when the memory of each mobile device is segmented into blocks and each of the shared data objects is of single block. On the other hand, in order to provide a practical way to address the problem, we then propose a (1, ε) asymptotic approximation algorithm, where ε > 0 and can be arbitrarily small, with a 2-augmentation-bound of memory size. In the end, a series of simulations was conducted, and the results were very encouraging.