A Framework for Adaptive Mobile Objects in Heterogeneous Environments

Abstract

Abstract. The majority of object migration systems do not support heterogeneous environments. Few systems solve this challenge by specifying a platform and language independent state transfer format, requiring a compatible implementation for every target language. However, fields of research like Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing with mobile users and applications demand an even more platform-independent, flexible and adaptive approach. This paper presents a novel approach for adaptive object and agent migration in heterogeneous environments based on our former work enabling language-and platform-independent object mobility in CORBA. By providing flexible mechanisms to reduce, expand and transform an object's state and functionality during migration, we support adaptation to the context and application-specific demands at the target system. This is achieved by introducing a separation of state, functionality and implementation code instead of mapping particular state on particular code. Our prototype system supports object migration from Java to C++ and vice versa. In principle, our concept can be transferred to any CORBA-supported programming language.

Mobile-process-based ubiquitous computing platform

“…This allows implementing mobile Web services that are able to provide tailored functionality, e.g., a fully-fledged facet and a functionality-restricted facet. This enables an implementation of simple workflows [11]: The mobile Web service facets implement different roles, which can change during the workflow process.…”

“…On the basis of the LCS implementation, we developed a context-aware LCS implementation [11]. There, we introduced a separation of state, functionality and implementation code for mobile objects.…”

C3S: A content sharing middleware for smart spaces

“…We explored pre-existing definitions, such as share object [12]- [15], and mobile object [16]- [18], however, they lacked features of sharing, such as migration, synchronization, and ubiquity, that these kind of application requires.…”

Adaptive Web Service Migration

“…Recently, we introduced a concept for context-aware object migration on basis of the CORBA life cycle service [7]. To the best of our knowledge, this service is the only one allowing dynamic adaptive object migration regarding state, interface and code at runtime.…”

“…The key difference to related work on migratable Web services [5,6] is the support for adaptation to the application context by dynamically changing the service interface, the available state and the implementation while maintaining a persistent Web service identity. Unlike our previous work on context-aware migration of CORBA objects [7], in this paper we propose the use of standard Web service technology as core mechanism, which simplifies interoperability between heterogeneous infrastructures of different vendors and allows disconnected operation. On the basis of our dynamic code loading infrastructure [8], the platform contains a novel dynamic deployment service that allows service migration to machines on which the needed code is unavailable and thus has to be loaded on demand.…”