Supporting Adaptive Application Mobility
Application mobility has the potential to enhance user experience in ubiquitous computing environments by providing a flexible and reusable solution to managing applications across myriad computing devices, especially when applications adapt to the charac
- PDF / 246,094 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 430 x 660 pts Page_size
- 14 Downloads / 162 Views
Abstract. Application mobility has the potential to enhance user experience in ubiquitous computing environments by providing a flexible and reusable solution to managing applications across myriad computing devices, especially when applications adapt to the characteristics of individual devices. Using example scenarios, we argue that application mobility is a better solution to the problem of accessing remote applications than schemes like remote desktop which only export displays. Our mobile application framework provides the opportunity for applications to better adapt their user interface to the new environment. This ability is enhanced through the use of the Model-View-Controller design pattern. Our framework also uses discovery mechanisms to find potential migration targets. Lost applications are recovered through a simple scheme called homing. A preliminary implementation for our framework is based on the JADE mobile agent platform.
1
Introduction
We live in a world where we are constantly surrounded by computers. Libraries, airports and coffee-shops have wireless networking or public computer terminals which provide Internet connectivity. Networked mobile computing devices like laptops, PDAs and smart phones are also widely available. With the constant availability of computing devices, it has become desirable to access our data and work from anywhere. We can achieve this to some degree using tools such as remote desktop, VNC [1] and XMOVE [2] which export user interfaces through a network; however, these solutions are not perfect and are deficient in several aspects. Let us consider the remote desktop solution to accessing applications available on your office PC through your laptop when you are away from the office. This would require that both your office PC and your laptop are connected to the Internet. This requirement holds even if the applications you are accessing don’t have any use for a network. Interactivity is also poor because of network latency issues. If your applications were mobile, you could move the applications to your laptop at any time and work with them without sacrificing response times even when you are disconnected from the network. Let us consider another scenario. You are editing a file on your office PC and would like to continue editing the file on a PDA during your commute back home. R. Meersman, Z. Tari, P. Herrero et al. (Eds.): OTM 2007 Ws, Part II, LNCS 4806, pp. 896–905, 2007. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
Supporting Adaptive Application Mobility
897
Normally, you would close the file on your PC, save the file to your PDA and start editing it using a PDA application. Wouldn’t it be nice if the application jumped from your PC to the PDA? And automatically adjusted itself to the smaller screen size? And reduced the use of energy intensive graphical effects to save battery power? After you finish editing the file, you start watching an on-demand movie on the PDA. When you walk into your home, it would be extremely convenient if the movie player migrates to your home computer a
Data Loading...
