Virtualized Approach Towards Achieving Seamless Mobility

Research Area : Systems, Embedded Systems ResearchResearch Topics: Operating Systems and Software Tools, Ubiquitous Computing for Future Computing EnvironmentsThe advent of the genre of personal computing and its gradual evolution into the 'state of the art' pervasive and ubiquitous computing era has resulted in the general user having access to a multitude of computing devices (PCs, Laptops, PDAs and cell phones). And with the increase in computing and storage capabilities of small hand-held devices, people have started using them for internet and multimedia related services. Add to that the increasing mobility of users and the difference in resource availability of different devices; and there is a need to provide mechanisms for service migration from one machine to another. However the heterogeneity and varying capability of I/O components (in different devices), makes seamless service mobility very difficult to achieve. There is a need for service customization in accordance with the changing environment. This could happen at the application layer or (in case the application does not support) it could happen inside operating system. In this paper we present an integrated approach towards achieving seamless mobility, using service state virtualization at the application layer and device state virtualization and capability adaptation inside operating system. We use Xen VMM for device interface virtualization and have devised a mechanism for inducing situation dependent capability adaptors into the IO data path