A typical mobile user employs multiple devices (e.g., a smartphone, a tablet, wearables, etc.). These devices are powered by varying mobile platforms. Enabling such cross-platform devices to seamlessly share their computational, network, and sensing resources has great potential benefit. However, sharing resources across platforms is challenging due to a number of difficulties. First, the varying communication protocols used by major mobile vendors tend to overlap minimally, making it impossible for the devices to communicate through a single protocol. Second, the host platforms’ underlying architectural differences lead to drastically dissimilar application architectures and programming support.

In this demo, we present Heterogeneous Device Hopping, a novel approach that systematically empowers heterogeneous mobile devices to seamlessly, reliably, and efficiently share their resources. The approach comprises 1) a declarative domain-specific language for device-to-device communication based on the RESTful architecture; 2) a powerful runtime infrastructure that supports the language’s programming model. In this demo, we show how our approach can be used to implement a multi-device animation across heterogeneous nearby devices. The animation starts on one device and moves across the device boundaries, irrespective of the underlying mobile platform.