Middleware-based services for virtual cooperative mobile platforms

Mobile computing devices like handhelds are becoming ubiquitous and so is computing embedded in cyber-physical systems like cameras, smart sensors, vehicles, and many others. Further, the computation and communication resources present in these settings are becoming increasingly powerful. The resulting, rich execution platforms are enabling increasingly complex applications and system uses. These trends enable richer execution platforms for running ever more complex distributed applications. This thesis explores these opportunities (i) for cooperative mobile platforms, where the combined resources of multiple computing devices and the sensors attached to them can be shared to better address certain application needs, and (ii) for distributed platforms where opportunities for cooperation are further strengthened by virtualization. The latter offers efficient abstractions for device sharing and application migration that enable applications to operate across dynamically changing and heterogeneous systems without their explicit involvement. An important property of cooperative distributed platforms is that they jointly and cooperatively provide and maintain the collective resources needed by applications. Another property is that these platforms make decisions about the resources allocated to certain tasks in a decentralized fashion. In contrast to volunteer computing systems, however, cooperation implies the commitment of resources as well as the commitment to jointly managing them. The resulting technical challenges for the mobile environments on which this thesis is focused include coping with dynamic network topology, the runtime addition and removal of devices, and resource management issues that go beyond resource usage and scheduling to also include topics like energy consumption and battery drain. Platform and resource virtualization can provide important benefits to cooperative mobile platforms, the key one being the ability to hide from operating systems and applications the complexities implied by collective resource usage. To realize this opportunity, this thesis extends current techniques for device access and sharing in virtualized systems, particularly to improve their flexibility in terms of their ability to make the implementation choices needed for efficient service provision and realization in the mobile and embedded systems targeted by this work. Specifically, we use middleware-based approaches to flexibly extend device and service implementations across cooperative and virtualized mobile platforms. First, for cooperating platforms, application-specific overlay networks are constructed and managed in response to dynamics at the application level and in the underlying infrastructure. When virtualizing these platforms, these same middleware techniques are shown capable of providing uniform services to applications despite platform heterogeneity and dynamics. The approach is shown useful for sharing and remotely accessing devices and services, and for device emulation in mobile settings.