Operating system support for distributed applications in real space-time

One of the central trends in the two last decades was the spreading of mobile systems. While first these devices were intended to be used for stand-alone applications, the trend is emerging towards cooperating mobile systems performing tasks jointly. The aspects of mobility were first considered in the sense of location transparency aiming to hide the problems raised by mobility from the application. However, upcoming applications need to be aware of location and motion requiring simultaneous coordination in space and time. Instead of addressing this problem by programming devices individually, we propose a systemic approach that abstracts from single devices. Two key issues that we address in the paper are the appropriate programming model and scheduling in real space-time. We will show that this can be realized best by the mean of a new distributed operating system for mobile systems and present a preliminary design for such an operating system called FlockOS.