Hiroo Ishikawa

A framework for connecting home computing middleware

In the future, microprocessors will be embedded in various appliances such as home appliances, digital AV appliances, and personal appliances. These appliances will be connected to various types of networks, such as Internet, and communicate with each other The communication of appliances would integrate some services provided by these appliances and make new services. The future home computing environment requires home computing middleware on which we can control home appliances easily and develop new services without a great effort. Most of recent middleware for home computing such as Jini and HAVi has no compatibility and adaptability with each other Therefore it is not easy for these appliances to communicate with other appliances which are controlled by any other middleware. Although there are some protocol bridges such as bridge between HAVi and Jini by Philips, Sony and Sun, these are almost only bridges of one and one. We need a framework with which we can integrate any middleware in a simpler way. In this paper, we propose a framework for connecting home computing middleware. It enables any appliance under any middlewares control to communicate any other appliances. We show also a service integration framework with Internet service and home computing middleware.

Building smart appliance integration middleware on the OSGi framework

The number of various kinds of everyday objects that contain embedded computers is increasing due to the popularity of ubiquitous computing. While component-based software development becomes common in a variety of application domains, ubiquitous computing requires component frameworks that offer more advanced features than the current component frameworks. This paper explores a component framework in the context of a ubiquitous computing system. We design and implement a system coordinating various home appliances, called SENCHA. SENCHA is built on the OSGi component framework. Although the framework provides facilities for dynamically changing environments, this paper reveals several problems of the framework in our experience

Technology challenges for building Internet-scale ubiquitous computing

In the future, many of the physical objects that surround us will be augmented with microprocessors and wireless transceivers. They will communicate with each other, quietly monitor our daily activities and notify us of important events. Any piece of relevant information on the Internet will be available to us anytime and anywhere. We call this scenario the Internet-scale ubiquitous computing environment. In our current lifestyle, one of the most precious and scarce resources is human attention. Internet-scale ubiquitous computing environments have the potential to make our daily life more comfortable and attractive because they will allow us to focus only on the essential tasks, letting technology take care of itself. However, building Internet-scale ubiquitous computing environments requires us to address a variety of technical issues. In particular we have to take into account the software development costs to build such an attractive future. As a road to developing the necessary software in a timely fashion, we propose to base the system on existing infrastructural software components such as Linux, Java and CORBA. We identify several important architectural problems that builders of Internet-scale ubiquitous computing environments will have to address, and we present some recommendations on the basis of our analysis and implementation experience.

A Framework for Self-Healing Device Drivers

Device drivers are the major cause of operating system failure. Prior research proposed frameworks to improve the reliability of device drivers by means of driver restart. While avoiding any instrumentation of the driver, this approach does not always allow graceful recovery. In this paper, we propose a framework for self-healing device drivers that lets the driver developer consider and implement the failure recovery of device drivers. For this purpose, our framework provides easy to use and light-weight persistent memory that preserves the state of the driver needed to successfully recover. We developed a prototype on top of the L4 microkernel, and were able to achieve full recovery of crashed drivers as fast as 0.2 ms for different device drivers. In all cases, recovery was totally transparent for the user.

A case study of implementing home appliance middleware on Linux and Java

This paper describes a case study of implementing a home appliance that enables us to control it via HTTP. The appliance been has implemented by using the Java language, and runs on Linux. The combination enables us to build the home appliance very cheaply. We present the implementation of our current prototype of a Web-based home appliance, and show how the combination of Java and Linux has reduced the development cost dramatically.

An Operating System Architecture for Future Information Appliances

A software platform for developing future information appliances requires to satisfy various diverse requirements. The operating system architecture presented in this paper enhances the flexibility and dependability through virtualization techniques. The architecture allows a system to use multiple operating systems simultaneously, and to use multi-core processors in a flexible way. Also, dependability mechanisms in our architecture will avoid crashing or hanging a system as much as possible in order to improve the user experience when defects in the software are exposed. We present a brief overview of each component in the operating system architecture and some sample scenarios that illustrate the effectiveness of the architecture.

A study on asymmetric operating systems on symmetric multiprocessors

This paper proposes a technique to achieve asymmetric multiple OSes environment for symmetric multiprocessors. The system has a host OS and guest OSes: L4 microkernel and their servers run as the host OS, and modified Linux runs as the guest OS. OS manager which is one of the servers on the host OS manages the guest OSes. Our approach avoids a lot of execution overheads and modification costs of the guest OSes because the each OS can control hardware directly without any virtualization. The results of the evaluation show that our system is much better than the existing virtual machine systems in point of the performance. In addition, a guest OS in our system requires a few amount of modification costs. Consequently, the experiments prove that our system is a practical approach for both performance and engineering cost sensitive systems.

Proactive operating system recovery

Embedded computers pervade our lives. There are increasing opportunities for them to adopt embedded operating systems as they are required to have high functionality and complexity. Unfortunately, the reliability of such embedded systems is insufficient to support our lives in 24/7. Therefore, we propose the fine-grain proactive recovery (FPR) of operating system components. FPR enables an operating system to periodically restart its modules and thus to keep their states clean.

Requirements for a component framework of future ubiquitous computing

System software for future computing environments is becoming more complex and heterogeneous. Portability is becoming one of the important properties of future system software. Component-based systems contribute to the portability issues. However component behaviors cause dependencies among components and thus prevent consistent system compositions. We have built a component-based Java virtual machine and tried three configurations with components in order to investigate the inter-component dependencies and the effect of the component behaviors. Also, this paper proposes requirements for a component framework for future ubiquitous computing.

Providing Protected Execution Environments for Embedded Operating Systems Using a μ -Kernel

There are a very large number of systems that have been developed on embedded operating system (OS) kernels. Those kernels typically do not provide protection domains because of the limitations of their target platforms. The requirements for embedded OS kernels are, however, changing. The current and future embedded systems software is becoming larger and more complex. In order to accommodate such large and complex software systems, embedded OS kernels are required to provide protection domains. This paper presents an approach, in which a microkernel is employed to provide protected execution environments for the existing embedded kernels. In each protected execution environment, a kernel and its applications run just as they run directly on hardware since they share the same protection domain. Our approach can achieve the maximum reusability of the existing software resources including embedded OS kernels and their applications; thus, it protects the existing software resources. We have developed the system that consists of TL4 microkernel and a μITRON embedded kernel, and shows the feasibility of our approach through evaluations.