Shared Resource and Service Management for Mobile Transparent Computing

The emerging technology of transparent computing has provided a new perspective of resource sharing and management due to the separation of computation and storage in this mode. In this paper, we introduce a framework of mobile transparent computing (MTC) by efficient integration of transparent computing and mobile computing. The MTC environment is a kind of decentralized networks that consist of mobile terminals and wireless links with the conspicuous characteristics: i.e., heterogeneous hardware architecture, diversified operating system (OS), closely coupling between hardware and software and unreliable network. However, these characters make it difficult to manage and allocate the resources and services in MTC. Therefore, we put forward a kind of shared resources and services management (SRSM) strategy for MTC with the ability of compatibility to multiple hardware architectures and mobile OSes. It is designed in a three layered architecture, i.e., the user layer, manage layer and resource layer. In the user layer, the virtualization technology is used to monitor heterogeneous mobile devices and decouple between hardware and software. After that, we run a user agent in each mobile device to collect resources information and requirements on it. The resource layer located in the server is responsible for central storage of resources and services including mobile OSes. The manage layer with several mobile agents on it acts as the core manager in SRSM. Through the interaction of user agent and mobile agents, the resources and services are scheduled and accounted dynamically on demand. Practical experiments on several development boards have testified that the proposed strategy is effective and stable under MTC circumstances.