Mobile Transparent Computing to Enable Ubiquitous Operating Systems and Applications

Abstract

Mobile devices have emerged as an indispensable part of our daily life, one that has resulted in an increased demand for mobile devices to be able to access the Internet and obtain a variety of network services. However, mobile devices are often constrained by limited storage, huge power consumption, and low processing capability. This paper presents a new computing mode, mobile transparent computing (MTC), which combines ubiquitous mobile networks with transparent computing, to address the above challenges and possibly to enable a new world of ubiquitous operating systems (OSes) and applications with the following characteristics: (1) Mobile devices with no OSes pre-installed are able to load and boot multiple OSes on demand through a transparent network; (2) All resources, including the operating system (OS), applications, and user data, are stored on a transparent server (TS) rather than a mobile terminal, and can be streamed to be executed on mobile devices in small execution blocks; (3) All the personalized services (applications and data) can be synchronized to any other devices with the same user credential. Specifically, we propose a Pre OS technique, which can achieve feature (1) in the MTC model by initializing the mobile device and driving a network interface card (NIC) prior to OS loading, thereby transferring the needed OS streaming block to the mobile device. Experimental results conducted on the tablet demo-board with the model OK6410 based on the ARM11 architecture demonstrate that the Pre OS is able to support remote boot and streaming execution for both Android and Linux OS with satisfactory performance.