Migration for Pervasive Applications

This paper explores migration, the ability to move an application between devices, in the context of pervasive, or ubiquitous, computing. Pervasive computing, with its vision of information access anytime and anywhere, introduces a new class of applications that seamlessly follow people as they move through the physical world. As a result, migration becomes an important building block for the development and deployment of pervasive applications. However, the main challenge with migration is to strike a reasonable balance between the complexity of implementing migration and the actual utility delivered to applications. In this paper, we introduce a migration service for pervasive applications that marks a new, practical design point in the design space. We explain the trade-offs made in its design, detail its implementation, and reflect on our own and others’ experiences with using it.