Towards a generic proxy execution service for small devices
Roger Kehr, Andreas Zeidler, Harald Vogt · 1999
Small devices such as PDAs, smartcards, or other gadgets with limited resources in terms of memory size, communication bandwidth, and battery consumption are becoming increasingly popular. Making these devices network-enabled is an effort currently undertaken by academic as well as commercial organizations. Though these devices will grow in the near future to become even more powerful computing machines, we believe that there will always be small devices around with inherently limited resources. Since we expect that future services will federate into an infrastructure for service discovery, some of the devices will require special assistance from their environment for this integration to be successful. We propose a general proxy execution service that offers small devices a platform for executing necessary proxy objects on a network node and give a taxonomy of the different requirements. Our concrete research prototype is a PDA which uses Infrared communication to send its device proxy to an execution service running on a network node. This proxy registers services running on the PDA in a Jini environment and acts as the gateway between the PDA and the network.