Transparent and adaptive application partitioning using mobile objects

The dynamic nature and heterogeneity of modern execution environments such as mobile, ubiquitous, and grid computing, present major challenges for the development and efficient execution of the applications targeted for these environments. In particular, applications tailored to run in a specific environment will show different and most likely sub-optimal behaviour when executed on a different and/or dynamic environment. Consequently, there has been growing interests in the area of application adaptation which aims to enable applications to cope with the varying execution environments. Adaptive application partitioning, a specific form of non-functional adaptation involving distribution of mobile objects across multiple host machines, is of particular interest to this thesis due to the diversity of its uses. In this approach, certain runtime information (known as context) is used to allow an object-oriented application to adaptively (re)adjust the placement of its objects during its execution, for purposes such as improving application performance and reliability as well as balancing resource utilisation across machines. Promoting the adoption of such adaptation requires a process that requires minimal human involvement in both the execution and the development of the relevant application. These challenges establish the main goals and contributions of this work, which include: 1) Proposing an effective application partitioning solution via the adoption of a decentralised adaptation strategy known as local adaptation. 2) Enabling adaptive application partitioning which does not require human intervention, through automatic collection of required information/context. 3) Proposing a solution for transparently injecting the required adaptation functionality into regular object-oriented applications allowing significant reduction of the associated development cost/effort. The proposed solutions have been implemented in a Java-based adaptation framework called MobJeX. This implementation, which was used as a test bed for the empirical experiments undertaken in this study, can be used to facilitate future research relevant to this particular study

Mobile code, adaptive mobile applications, and network architectures

Mobile computing is characterized by many constraints: small, slow, battery-powered portable devices, variable and low-bandwidth communication links. These constraints complicate the design of mobile information systems. In our work, mobile applications, especially ones that do intensive computation and communication (such as next-generation multi-medial PCS and UMTS applications), can be divided dynamically between the wired network and the portable device according to the mobile environment and to the availability of the resources on the device, the wireless link, and the access network. To demonstrate our idea, we developed a code mobility toolkit and experimented with a resource-intense mobile application. With potentially many users executing such applications, the scalability of our approach becomes extremely important. We will briefly discuss performance prediction models based on measurements and LQNs (layered queuing networks). Our results show that it is feasible to support many users with a single dedicated proxy server in the wireless access network