Context aware deployment for mobile users

Abstract

With the development of mobile computing, applications have to be accessible at any time, from any device and in any place in a wide variety of execution contexts. Consequently, applications have to adapt to different terminal capabilities both for efficiency and ergonomics. In this paper, we present a deployment infrastructure, called smart deployment infrastructure (SDI), which aims to ease the installation of large distributed applications for any kind of user terminal. SDI is designed to take into account the execution context (including available resources and the user's terminal capabilities) in order to bring an application to the user and adapt it to the execution context. By considering an application as an assembly of distributed software components, SDI provides the opportunity to decide at installation time which components, among packaged components, will be instantiated on the terminal and which ones will be installed on other hosts. SDI implementation demonstrates that the deployment infrastructure offers acceptable application deployment times and, at the same time, lowers both the application execution times and terminal resource consumption.