A proactive middleware platform for mobile computing

  • Authors:

  • Andrei Popovici;Andreas Frei;Gustavo Alonso

  • Affiliations:

  • Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ), ETH Zentrum, Zürich, Switzerland;Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ), ETH Zentrum, Zürich, Switzerland;Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ), ETH Zentrum, Zürich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 2003 International Conference on Middleware
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

An obvious prerequisite for mobile computing devices is the ability to adapt to different computing environments. Otherwise the devices are forced to carry with them everything they may eventually need during their operational life time. This is neither desirable nor feasible, thereby hinting at the need for dynamic adaptation. The idea would be to let the environment be proactive and adapt the application rather than forcing the application to adapt itself to every possible environment. In this paper we present a platform for doing exactly this. Applications running on our modified JVM can be extended at run time with new functionality. Through this platform, mobile devices can acquire on-the-fly any functionality extension they may need to work properly in a given environment. The functionality extensions are local in time and space: they are active only on a specific site and just for the time they are needed. The platform can be used in both centralized settings (with a base station providing the extensions) or in self configuring mode (extensions are provided by peers). In this paper we describe the platform, how to use it and report on one of the several prototypes that have been constructed.