Software agent-virtualized application mobility in pervasive environments

In virtualized computing environments, users' mobility in physical space poses a challenge in the research on the applications' mobility in cyber space. The characteristics of network-intensiveness and resource-intensiveness in pervasive environments provide an opportunity for application mobility. To support it, the paper exploits software Agents to realize the resource virtualization in cyber space. It investigates the application mobility from the perspectives of underlying application model, mobility management, and context-awareness, etc. By exploiting software Agents' inherent autonomy and mobility, an Agent-based mechanism for adaptive component binding and migration is proposed. A framework called MDAgent is proposed and the corresponding prototype is implemented. It can provide the support of mobility management, context-awareness, resource matching and logic reasoning for the application mobility. On top of the framework, several applications are implemented and the performances are evaluated.