CMU-CS-08-117
Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University



CMU-CS-08-117

Transient Customization of Mobile
Computing Infrastructure

Adam Wolbach, Jan Harkes, Srinivas Chellappa, M. Satyanarayanan

April 2008

CMU-CS-08-117.pdf


Keywords: Virtual machine, VM, VirtualBox, cyber foraging, composable computing, Open-Diamond, Nokia N810 tablet, large displays, 802.11, service discovery, Avahi

Kimberley enables rapid software provisioning of fixed infrastructure for transient use by a mobile device. It uses virtual machine (VM) technology, but avoids the performance challenges of running VMs on resource-poor mobile devices. VM execution only occurs in the infrastructure and never on the mobile device; however, the device may transport and interpret parts of VM state. Kimberley decomposes VM state into a widely-available base VM and a much smaller private VM overlay. The base is downloaded in advance; the overlay is delivered on demand from the mobile device or under its control from a public web site. We have built a prototype of Kimberley, and our experiments confirm the feasibility of this approach.

11 pages


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