Adaptive Rental Resource System for Home - Area Networks

This paper proposes an adaptive rental resource system, that manages computational resources such as disk space, memory space and CPU power in home-area networks comprised of various devices (e.g. personal computers and information appliances). This system enables " poor " devices with limited computational resources to rent excess computational resources from " rich " devices. Existing distributed systems and software frameworks for home-area networks do not consider important characteristics on home-area network environments ; such as user needs based on family members' interests and device physical state change; e.g. disconnection and reconnection to networks. The proposed system overcomes this problem by employing dynamic adaptation mechanisms. Resource renting mechanisms in the proposed system enable us to provide services currently unavailable in existing home server systems. A prototype system of the adaptive rental resource system, called PPS/J, was designed and implemented on Java virtual machines to demonstrate the advantages of our proposed system. The overhead of the dynamic adaptation mechanisms was measured on the PPS/J, and we found it sufficiently low during application program execution.