CSR---VCM: Managing a Concurrent Opportunistic Sensor Environment with Pocket Hypervisors

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

Concurrent opportunistic sensor environments (COPSE) aim to create a decentralized peer-to-peer platform for harnessing the computational resources within a geographic area for mobile and pervasive services. The nodes within an area can be a mix of fixed elements like access points and highly mobile devices like mobile phones. Nodes contribute resources such as virtual machine hosting or Internet connectivity voluntarily and can revoke resources without notification. Services execute across a heterogeneous set of elements and are composed of individual virtual machine instantiations. Depending on the nodes running them, service instantiations may execute across different energy budgets, communication technologies, and storage quotas. For COPSE to succeed, it must marshal enough volunteered resources for services to run and expose information about the rapidly changing availability of resources so that services can adapt to churn. This requires meeting research challenges in two broad areas. The first area is virtual machine interfaces that expose changes in local resources and co-located nodes; these interfaces will allow services to reconfigure themselves in response to resource churn. The second area is minimizing the opportunity costs of participating in cooperative mobile systems like COPSE; pocket hypervisors must provide mechanisms and policies that protect device owners and concurrently running services from buggy or malicious instantiations.