TRACK: keeping track of highly mobile objects: a lanugage-level proposal position paper

• Authors: Eric Jul
• Venue: Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Implementation, Compilation, Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages, Programs and Systems
• Year: 2013

This paper proposes a novel language mechanism to accommodate applications that depend on keeping track of the location of highly mobile objects. New applications are driven by several new trends: new, powerful devices such as smart-phones and Google Glass and vastly improved connectivity between such devices and powerful data centers in the Cloud. Applications running on such new, relatively thin clients, can immensely benefit from the enormous data and compute power provided by Cloud computing. As such devices are inherently highly mobile, they will move along the edge of the cloud and it may be advantageous to track such mobility. Furthermore, objects executing in the cloud may move onto the devices to achieve low latency, or, vice versa, may move from the device into the cloud as to leverage the power of the Cloud. In this position paper, we propose a language mechanism to track the mobility of individual objects, so that an application can rapidly adapt to such mobility. The construct is proposed for Emerald, but will be applicable to most other OO languages albeit not as cleanly as in Emerald. The implementation is integrated into the underlying Emerald virtual machine (i.e., the run-time system). We give an overview of the implementation details and discuss the reliability of the mechanism. Keeping track of devices is modelled by keeping track of an object residing on the device.