Seamless I/O Driver for Ubiquitous Environment

In the ubiquitous environment, users can choose one of the devices according to their necessity and situation. Because it is very cumbersome to switch I/O device manually, middleware is made to do this work. However, seamless switching is not possible for environments in which middleware is not installed or application programs which do not run on middleware. We could resolve this problem by simply adding a light weighted virtual device driver into kernel and installing a seamless manager daemon. Therefore, widely used application programs, which are not middleware-based, need not to be modified for seamless switching. With this method, user’s effort to switch device is not nearly necessary. And switching delay time is reduced remarkably. Moreover, proposed method demands little processing power and memory space for added virtual device driver and daemon. In addition, our approach provides functions of device failure detection and automatic switching with low delay.