Use of Logical Mobility for Mobile Self-Organisation

Mobile systems are an extreme instance of highly dynamic distributed systems; mobile applications are typically hosted by resource-constrained environments and may have to dynamically reorganise in response to unforeseeable changes of user needs, to the heterogeneity and connectivity challenges from the computational environment, as well as to changes to the execution context and physical environment. Current mobile application development features static and monolithic applications making them suitable for a fixed execution context but very limited for mobile devices. We argue that mobile computing systems can benefit from the use of self-organisation primitives. In particular, we argue that the application of logical mobility primitives, such as remote evaluation, code on demand and mobile agents as well as the componentisation of the system assist in building self-organising mobile systems. We show that a component model is required by the application of logical mobility primitives for self-organisation and discuss one. We also show how the primitives can be made available to application programmers using a light-weight component-based middleware and discuss satin (Self Adaptation Targeting Integrated Networks), a prototype component-based middleware system implementing these primitives. We also discuss the extent to which satin supports the development of self-organising systems, by building a deployment system that manages the dynamic installation and update of components on mobile hosts.