Improving the Performance, Availability, and Security of Data Access for Opportunistic Mobile Computing

OF THE DISSERTATION Improving the Performance, Availability, and Security of Data Access for Opportunistic Mobile Computing by Stephen D. Smaldone Dissertation Director: Liviu Iftode An opportunistic model of mobile computing is presently emerging in which users can fully benefit from their personal computing environment wherever they are without having to carry “heavy-weight” mobile systems with them. The transition to this model can be seen as part of the pervasive computing vision, being catalyzed by the near ubiquity of powerful smart phones, the increasing availability of local PC hardware, and recent trends in virtualization and cloud computing. The fate of the opportunistic mobile computing model will be essentially decided by the performance, availability, and security of data access relative to alternative solutions. Mobile users require safe and efficient access to their data from whatever PC or device they are currently using, wherever they may be. These requirements expose several new challenges to the performance, availability, and security of user data access under opportunistic mobile computing conditions. In this dissertation, we identify challenges to user data access within the opportunistic mobile computing model, present novel approaches to address them, and demonstrate the effectiveness of these approaches through extensive experimentation. To improve the performance of data access for opportunistic mobile computing, we introduce the concept of safe borrowing of local storage, which we prototyped as the TransPart