SHF:CSR:Small: Perpetuum Mobile: Orchestrating the Provisioning of Pervasive Resources for Emerging Mobile Applications

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

This project develops Perpetuum Mobile, a unified framework that unburdens mobile developers from using dissimilar, low-level programming interfaces to access external resources required for the efficient execution of emerging mobile applications. The ever increasing computational power of mobile devices is being surpassed by the even faster growing resource demands of mobile applications. These demands can be effectively fulfilled by using distributed resources, provided by cloud servers, desktop computers, or other mobile devices. However, existing approaches for accessing the external resources fail to provide a unified and uniform avenue for integrating heterogeneous and pervasive resources with emerging mobile applications. Mobile developers have no choice but to use dissimilar programming interfaces and protocols through software abstractions that cannot effectively meet the requirements of mobile users and developers as well as device owners and administrators. To address this problem, Perpetuum Mobile selects devices that best satisfy the requirements, deploys the external resources on any selected network-connected device on-demand, and provides a uniform access to the resources. The ultimate technical objective of this project is to make it as straightforward, efficient, reliable, and secure for mobile applications to access the resources hosted by any network-connected device as it is currently to access standard web services. To meet the execution requirements of mobile applications, Perpetuum Mobile evolves the microservices pattern: it carefully curates microservices and deploys them at runtime by using a new software infrastructure component that combines features of mobile application markets and service repositories. It further identifies the most suitable service-providing device efficiently by applying a lattice model for expressing requirements, and a weighted distance based selection heuristic. Finally, this project identifies and seeks solutions for the security and privacy problems that threaten the safety of the developed execution model. By providing seemingly unlimited resources, the technologies created under the auspices of this project will form the foundation for the next generation of mobile, IoT, and wearable applications. The project will recruit a diverse group of participants, while making the created technologies publicly available for adoption, training, and experimentation.