A memory isolation method for OSGi-based home gateways

Abstract

This paper proposes a new memory isolation method for OSGi-based home gateways. The OSGi technology enables embedded gateway devices for smart home services to run multiple software components; "bundles" in OSGi. In OSGi-based smart home platforms, third party service providers' bundles share the limited memory resources of the Java Virtual Machine. If a faulty bundle that is malicious or buggy consumes excessive memory, the platform and other healthy bundles will freeze. To address this issue, we propose a new method that can isolate the memory consumption of bundles without the need to modify bundles or the OSGi framework and has minimal overhead costs. We start by defining the memory consumption of bundles from the new viewpoint of application level "function" for an OSGi-based smart home platform.