LIME: A coordination model and middleware supporting mobility of hosts and agents

  • Authors:
  • Amy L. Murphy;Gian Pietro Picco;Gruia-Catalin Roman

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Lugano, Lugano (TI), Switzerland;Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy;Washington University, St. Louis, MO

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

LIME (Linda in a mobile environment) is a model and middleware supporting the development of applications that exhibit the physical mobility of hosts, logical mobility of agents, or both. LIME adopts a coordination perspective inspired by work on the Linda model. The context for computation, represented in Linda by a globally accessible persistent tuple space, is refined in LIME to transient sharing of the identically named tuple spaces carried by individual mobile units. Tuple spaces are also extended with a notion of location and programs are given the ability to react to specified states. The resulting model provides a minimalist set of abstractions that facilitates the rapid and dependable development of mobile applications. In this article we illustrate the model underlying LIME, provide a formal semantic characterization for the operations it makes available to the application developer, present its current design and implementation, and discuss lessons learned in developing applications that involve physical mobility.