Satin: A Component Model for Mobile Self Organisation

We have recently witnessed a growing interest in self organising systems, both in research and in practice. These systems re-organise in response to new or changing conditions in the environment. The need for self organisation is often found in mobile applications; these applications are typically hosted in resource-constrained environments and may have to dynamically reorganise in response to changes of user needs, to heterogeneity and connectivity challenges, as well as to changes in the execution context and physical environment. We argue that physically mobile applications benefit from the use of self organisation primitives. We show that a component model that incorporates code mobility primitives assists in building self organising mobile systems. We present satin, a lightweight component model, which represents a mobile system as a set of interoperable local components. The model supports reconfiguration, by offering code migration services. We discuss an implementation of the satin middleware, based on the component model and evaluate our work by adapting existing open source software as satin components and by building and testing a system that manages the dynamic update of components on mobile hosts.