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Whatever, Whenever In-between !
Persistent Applications Across Networks
Systems Group The Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
PhD student Aisha Elsafty
amse2_at_cam.ac.uk Supervisor Dr. David Greaves
Overview
Work in Progress
User attention is by far the most precious
resource in a world where computational and
networking infrastructure is becoming cheaper and
cheaper. In that same world, applications are
expected to make optimum use of the dynamically
changing resources offered by different
environments as users move around. Applications
thus have to be conscious of their environment
making the best use of its resources. However,
adapting to environment and reconfiguration
should occur transparently from the user. To
allow you to watch a match on a PDA in the car,
then resume watching it on the big screen at home
once you arrive there, without having to adjust
channels and perhaps starting at the last scene
you last watched, we look into behavior of mobile
applications that persist across devices and
networks.
Data-Centric Model of Mobile Applications The
model classifies the mobile application data
according to persistence, update frequency and
the credentials and access rights attached to
them. Data items are thus classified as
volatile vs. persistent, dynamic vs. static and
public vs. private. Application developers can
tag data used by their applications according to
this classification at design time.
Approach We construct a Domain Specific Language
for Mobile Applications. The data-centric model
is used to construct primitives in this domain
language. Such primitives handle the data
housekeeping tasks. The application developer
tags the data attributes of his application
appropriately based on the model, and the domain
specific language compiler generates the needed
code for handling data persistence and updates.
Research Questions
?How to sustain the application state as the
application migrates and adapts to the
environment? ?How can the augment the networking
stack to support the persistence of applications
as they move across different networks? ?How to
enable the application developer to specify
application response to presence or absence of
certain resources?
Current Stage We are looking into the definition
of the domain specific language for mobile
computing. We will proceed next to optimize the
application layer of ambient network
protocol for application migration.
Related Work
Pebbles Framework
Pebbles are independent software or hardware
units. Orchestrated through an