MobiSys Related Work

Use this to audit novelty and coverage. Reopen the current CFP for dual-submission, anonymity, and prior-publication rules before advising authors. At MobiSys the failure mode is usually a too-narrow related-work section that misses a sibling-venue predecessor.

Positioning checks

• Separate the system contribution from an engineering improvement: a new runtime mechanism, scheduling policy, on-device inference system, sensing service, or platform.
• Cover the mobile-systems lanes below; a bibliography that cites only machine-learning papers tells a systems reviewer that known mobile-systems work may be getting rediscovered.
• Treat ACM DL, USENIX, and IEEE proceedings as archival unless current rules say otherwise.
• Cite arXiv and workshop versions in a way that preserves double-blind review; do not point reviewers to identity-revealing pages.
• Use related work to sharpen what is new: a tighter energy budget, a lower latency tail, an on-device capability that previously required the cloud, or a deployment others only simulated.

Literature lanes to sweep

A related-work section that ignores the SenSys or OSDI predecessor of a mobile-systems idea is a recognizable MobiSys reject pattern that no amount of on-device polish repairs.

Venue-verification discipline

The mobile-systems canon is easy to misattribute because MobiSys, MobiCom, and SenSys share the SIGMOBILE umbrella:

• Verify each cited "MobiSys paper" on the ACM DL and dblp by matching the conf/mobisys record; TaintDroid is OSDI, CenceMe is SenSys, RF-sensing classics are MobiCom/SIGCOMM (see ../../resources/exemplars/library.md).
• Do not cite a paper as MobiSys from memory; a misattributed venue signals careless scholarship to a specialist reviewer.

Concurrent-work judgment calls

• Independently concurrent arXiv work: cite neutrally, state the technical difference, and avoid priority claims reviewers cannot verify.
• Your own workshop (e.g., HotMobile) version: typically non-archival and citable, but verify against the current CFP and phrase the citation so double-blind review survives.
• When in doubt about the archival status of a venue, declare the overlap in the submission form rather than gambling on a chair's interpretation.

Positioning vignette

Imagine the paper proposes a thermal-aware on-device inference runtime. Its nearest neighbors: an on-device DNN scheduler at MobiSys with no thermal model, a mobile-GPU inference framework at MobiSys tuned for peak not sustained load, and an OS-level DVFS mechanism at OSDI. The novelty sentence should name all three contrasts — thermal-awareness where the scheduler had none, sustained-load stability where the GPU framework optimized peak, and application-level control where the OS mechanism was generic.

Output format

[Eligibility] clear / needs declaration / risky
[Closest lanes] <offload / on-device ML / mobile OS / sensing / energy>
[Nearest 3 works] <work -> distinction>
[Venue-verification risk] <none / misattribution issues>
[Novelty sentence] <MobiSys-ready contribution contrast>