Abstract

Wireless-enabled electronic devices are becoming cheaper, more powerful and thus more popular. They include sensors, actuators, smartphones, tablets, wearable devices, and other complex devices. They can carry out complex tasks, cooperating with their ``neighbors''. However, it is difficult to develop mobile applications to exploit the full power of available resources because the computational capabilities on devices are not homogeneous, and their connectivity changes with physical movement. We propose a mobile environment model to describe the connected devices and study the structural and behavioral characteristics of the environments. Based on the model, we design the routing protocols and a language to support the composition of environments. We propose a framework to provide a unified, flexible and scalable service for task/process deployment and execution on top of the heterogeneous and dynamic mobile environments. We compare different architectures, and discuss the optimization of resources discovery and routing algorithm. A proof-of-concept framework is implemented and shows the feasibility of our Environment-as-a-Service approach. Finally, we explore the theoretical principles and practical techniques for performance optimization, including a data prefetching technique and a dynamic process/task allocation algorithm.