An Efficient Bundle Replacement Algorithm for OSGi Platform

OSGi is a middleware standard for home gateways, designed for smart home applications. OSGi models services as separate components, called bundles. Smart home applications might differ in their importance. For example, home security system is more important than Internet game. Bundles collaborate to provide the required service. This paper proposes a bundle replacement algorithm that takes into account the priority of the bundle and the interdependence between different bundles. Thus, given a home gateway that hosts several applications with different priorities and arbitrary dependencies among them. When the home gateway runs out of memory, which bundles will be stopped or kicked out of memory to start a new service. Because of the bundle dependencies, traditional memory management algorithms might not be efficient. Efficient replacement algorithm should stop the least important and a small number of bundles. The proposed algorithm takes into consideration the priority of the bundle or application and dependencies between different bundles, in addition to the amount of memory occupied by each service. We implement the proposed algorithms and performed many experiments to evaluate its performance and execution time. We used best fit and worst fit as yardstick to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. The proposed algorithms are implemented as a part of the OSGi framework (Open Service Gateway initiative).