APPLICATION MOBILITY IN ACTIVE SPACES

Workshop on Application …, 2001

In this paper, we present an overview of our research project with Gaia, a development infrastructure for ubiquitous applications. This infrastructure is based on three main elements: a component-based middleware operating system that provides a generic computational environment for ubiquitous computing, an application model that defines a standard mechanism to build ubiquitous applications, and a scripting language that we use to assemble componentbased applications and to coordinate activities in ubiquitous computing scenarios.

Mobility has become an omnipresent part of our modern IT society. Alongside the general taxonomy of mobile users, terminals, sessions, and services, there are also more specialized forms of mobility. Context-Awareness Supported Application Mobility (CASAM) or "Application Mobility" is one such form that is explored in this chapter. CASAM builds on the idea of using context to move an application between different devices during its execution in order to provide relevant information and/or services. The authors use a concept-driven approach to advance mobile systems research, integrating it with a more traditional user-centric method and a case study, further exploring the concept of CASAM. To empirically situate our design work they conducted an empirical study of a home care service group serving the Swedish municipality of Skellefteå, followed by an exercise in matching the properties of the CASAM concept in relation to problems within current workflow.

… systems II: Fifth …, 2002

IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2000

2007

This paper proposes a framework intended to help developers to create ubiquitous applications. We argue that context is a key concept in ubiquitous computing and that, by nature, a ubiquitous application is distributed and needs to be easily deployable. Thus we propose an easy way to build applications made of numerous modules spread in the environment and interconnected. This network of modules forms a permanently running system. The control (installation, update, etc.) of such a module is obtained by a simple, possibly remote, command and without requiring to stop the whole system. We ourselves used this architecture to create a ubiquitous application, which we present here as an illustration.

2005

Applications designed for ubiquitous computing environments need to be coded in a specific way in order to fully realize the benefits of ubiquitous computing. Currently, applications for ubiquitous computing environments either need to be rewritten entirely to benefit from ubiquity, or special wrappers need to be written and customized for particular applications to provide limited compatibility. We argue that the real-world deployment of ubiquitous computing will be realized when users can migrate and use the applications they are familiar with in their daily lives with minimal effort. Furthermore, these applications should automatically benefit from typical ubiquitous computing features including multi-device support, runtime adaptation, environment-independence and context-awareness.

icoin, 2001

The LocALE (Location-Aware Lifecycle Environment) framework provides a simple management interface for controlling the lifecycle of CORBA distributed objects. It supports mechanisms for the remote construction, movement, removal and recovery of heterogeneous software objects in a location domain, i.e. a group of hosts on a network within a given physical area. Client applications use LocALE to intelligently control their required services' location and relocation in the network. LocALE offers load-balancing, automatic activation, and fault-tolerance facilities for the services whose lifecycles it controls. It provides the middleware necessary for the efficient implementation of location-aware mobile applications in richly equipped network environments. LocALE's infrastructure has been tested with the development of several follow-me applications that dynamically move with their users as they change location. For illustration, two of these follow-me LocALEenabled applications are described.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003

One form of software architecture is a framework for systems that serve the needs of a specific domain. These frameworks must contain sufficient detail to not lose the interesting aspects of the environment, yet they must not expose so many details as to be overwhelming and force the developer to lose the big picture. As the environments we develop for become more complex, it becomes more necessary to compose these frameworks in order to manage the complexity. Mobility is precisely one such environment that is emerging as computing components shrink in size and become more portable. As these components change location in space, their connectivity to other components changes and thus their access to data changes. Some programs needs to be able to respond to this change in connectivity. Others are able to abstract it away, simply perceiving changes in connectivity as changes in data availability. In this paper, we overview a solution to managing the complexity of applications for the the mobile environment in the context of a middleware. First, we present a meta-model, or a framework for generating middleware for mobile environments. Second, we show how this meta-model has been instantiated in the Lime middleware and how it has been used to develop several mobile applications.

International Conference on Wireless Information Networks and Systems, 2007

This article introduces the QuickFrame, a development tool that allows mobile applications to run in several different types of mobile devices. That is only possible due to the fact that the QuickFrame possesses a standard specification language and has the capability of defining the application interface, verifying the target devices' specifications and pre-visualizing the user interface. Therefore, several of the problems caused by the large number of mobile device models available and their different specifications are eliminated. Thru reaching to that goal we have a tool to make mobile applications more pervasive.

International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms and Open Distributed Processing/Open Distributed Processing, 2003

Ubiquitous computing challenges the conventional notion of a user logged into a personal computing device, whether it is a desktop, a laptop, or a digital assistant. When the physical environment of a user contains hundreds of networked computer devices each of which may be used to support one or more user applications, the notion of personal computing becomes inadequate. Further, when a group of users share such a physical environment, new forms of sharing, cooperation and collaboration are possible and mobile users may constantly change the computers with which they interact; we refer to these digitally augmented physical spaces as Active Spaces. We present in this paper an application framework that provides mechanisms to construct, run or adapt existing applications to ubiquitous computing environments. The framework binds applications to users, uses multiple devices simultaneously, and exploits resource management within the users’ environment that reacts to context and mobility. Our research contributes to application mobility, partitioning and adaptation within device rich environments, and uses context-awareness to focus the resources of ubiquitous computing environments on the needs of users.