Anugeetha Kunjithapatham

Towards an Elastic Application Model for Augmenting the Computing Capabilities of Mobile Devices with Cloud Computing

We propose a new elastic application model that enables seamless and transparent use of cloud resources to augment the capability of resource-constrained mobile devices. The salient features of this model include the partition of a single application into multiple components called weblets, and a dynamic adaptation of weblet execution configuration. While a weblet can be platform independent (e.g., Java or .Net bytecode or Python script) or platform dependent (native code), its execution location is transparent—it can be run on a mobile device or migrated to the cloud, i.e., run on one or more nodes offered by an IaaS provider. Thus, an elastic application can augment the capabilities of a mobile device including computation power, storage, and network bandwidth, with the light of dynamic execution configuration according to device’s status including CPU load, memory, battery level, network connection quality, and user preferences. This paper presents the motivation behind developing elastic applications and their architecture including typical elasticity patterns and cost models that are applied to determine the elasticity patterns. We implement a reference architecture and develop a set of elastic applications to validate the augmentation capabilities for smartphone devices. We demonstrate promising results of the proposed application model using data collected from one of our example elastic applications.

Securing elastic applications on mobile devices for cloud computing

Cloud computing provides elastic computing infrastructure and resources which enable resource-on-demand and pay-as-you-go utility computing models. We believe that new applications can leverage these models to achieve new features that are not available for legacy applications. In our project we aim to build elastic applications which augment resource-constrained platforms, such as mobile phones, with elastic computing resources from clouds. An elastic application consists of one or more weblets, each of which can be launched on a device or cloud, and can be migrated between them according to dynamic changes of the computing environment or user preferences on the device. This paper overviews the general concept of this new application model, analyzes its unique security requirements, and presents our design considerations to build secure elastic applications. As first steps we propose a solution for authentication and secure session management between weblets running device side and those on the cloud. We then propose secure migration and how to authorize cloud weblets to access sensitive user data such as via external web services. We believe some principles in our solution can be applied in other cloud computing scenarios such as application integration between private and public clouds in an enterprise environment.

Towards an Elastic Application Model for Augmenting Computing Capabilities of Mobile Platforms

We propose a new elastic application model that enables the seamless and transparent use of cloud resources to augment the capability of resource-constrained mobile devices. The salient features of this model include the partition of a single application into multiple components called weblets, and a dynamic adaptation of weblet execution configuration. While a weblet can be platform independent (e.g., Java or .Net bytecode or Python script) or platform dependent (native code), its execution location is transparent – it can be run on a mobile device or migrated to the cloud, i.e., run on one or more nodes offered by an IaaS provider. Thus, an elastic application can augment the capabilities of a mobile device including computation power, storage, and network bandwidth, with the light of dynamic execution configuration according to device’s status including CPU load, memory, battery level, network connection quality, and user preferences. This paper presents the motivations, concepts, typical elasticity patterns, and cost consideration of elastic applications. We validate the augmentation capabilities with an implemented reference architecture and example applications.

SeeNSearch: A Context Directed Search Facilitator for Home Entertainment Devices

The Internet has become an extremely popular source of entertainment and information. But, despite the growing amount of media content, most Web sites today are designed for access via web browsers on the PC, making it difficult for home consumers to access Internet content on their TVs or other devices that lack keyboards. As a result, the Internet is generally restricted to access on the PC or via cumbersome interfaces on non-PC devices. In this paper, we present unobtrusive and assistive technologies enabling home users to easily find and access Internet content related to the TV program they are watching. Using these technologies, the user is now able to access relevant information and video content on the Internet while watching TV.

Elastic HTML5: Workload Offloading Using Cloud-Based Web Workers and Storages for Mobile Devices

In this position paper, we propose the concept of Elastic HTML5, which enables web applications to offload workload using cloud-based web workers and cloud-based storage for mobile devices. Elastic HTML5 is a collection of software components and functions in for a web runtime agent (e.g., web browser); this includes components and methods to create and manage web workers in the cloud so as to augment the computation functionality of a browser-based application running on a device. Elastic HTML5 also includes the components and methods to create and manage elastic storage between the main thread of a web application and its web workers. With these functions, a web application can run in elastic manner such that, whenever necessary, the mobile device can obtain resources from the cloud, including computation and storage, and when necessary, it can run offline at the device side completely.

Sensor fusion of physical and social data using Web SocialSense on smartphone mobile browsers

Modern smartphones offer a rich selection of onboard sensors, where sensor access is typically performed through API calls provided by the phones operating system. In this paper we evaluate the viability of implementing sensor processing entirely in the Web browser layer with Web SocialSense, a JavaScript framework for Tizen smartphones that uses a graph topology-based paradigm. This framework enables programmers to write personalized, context-aware applications that can dynamically fuse time-series signals from physical sensors (such as the accelerometer and geolocation services) and social software sensors (such as social network services and personal information management applications). To demonstrate the framework we implemented components for physical sensing and social software sensing to drive two context-aware applications, ActVertisements and Social Map.

Interplay: a middleware for integration of devices, services and contents in the home networking environment

Current home networking technologies such as UPNP, Jini and HAVi, only focus on connecting devices electronically in a variety of different forms that allow simple device interactions. The result is that devices act in incompatible islands, making their use confusing to users and a nightmare for application developers. To realize a smart home environment, we need to seamlessly integrate devices and services into our every day lives. In this paper, we describe a middleware platform to provide the integration of devices, services and contents in a home. Our middleware facilitates integration of both data (content, preferences, etc.) and applications across home networking technologies to improve consumer and developer usability.