OPEN Platform for Migration of Interactive Services: Architecture and Evaluation

One important aspect of ubiquitous environments is to provide users with the possibility to freely move about and continue to interact with the available applications through a variety of interactive devices such as cell phones, PDAs, desktop computers, intelligent watches, or digital television sets. Migratory applications are able to follow the user by sensing changes in the user's context and adapting to available devices, ideally without interrupting the user experience. However, applications themselves must contain functions to monitor context information, coordinate a migration, handle application adaptation, and interact with the user during the migration process. To make life easier for developers and users of migratory applications, an integrated Migration Service Platform (MSP) is proposed, where all the common migration functions are centralised. The authors show how the platform is realised as middleware that contains a server for the central functions and lightweight client-side running on the end-user devices. The authors show how migratory applications can interact with the platform and thereby do not have to contain migration functions themselves. The authors describe the challenges following the centralisation of a migration platform that can support different types of applications, both games and business applications, implemented with either web-technologies or as component-based applications.