Exploring Potential and Feasibility of Binary Code Sharing in Mobile Computing

Chao Wu, Lan Zhang, Zhenhua Li, Qiushi Li, Yaoxue Zhang

Abstract: While tremendous growing mobile apps offer users rich services and functionalities, they also bring significant performance and energy issues. Code sharing is promising to address these issues, but existing application-level code sharing is rather restrictive. This paper develops the a transparent machine code sharing for mobile devices, and presents its design, implementation, and deployment. SnapCode enables machine code sharing across a wide variety of commercial off-the-shelf Android devices. By sharing and running machine code, SnapCode can offer significant speed-ups: an average speed-up of 9.9X for one-time trial apps, and up to 120X in apps’ regular uses. In addition, it can save more than 80 percent energy consumption.