A context-aware application mobility approach

Abstract: Over the last two decades, mobile computing has gone from being a mere vision to becoming a reality, ubiquitously present in our everyday lives. There are different types of mobility, from user and terminal mobility, to mobility of services and sessions. This thesis is mainly about application mobility { the ability for an application to migrate between different host devices during its execution. The aim of this thesis work is to explore and advance the area of application mobility. The thesis approaches this goal through focusing on three research issues: Architectural considerations for application mobility; Context-awareness support and application adaptability; and Concept exploration. The contributions of this thesis include the identification of requirements for application mobility and a proposal for a decentralized, global scale architecture for application mobility, building on the peer-to-peer paradigm. Several prototypes of systems allowing application mobility are deployed, manifesting concepts such as decentralized system layout, context-awareness, context quality and global scope. Evaluations are both quantitative and qualitative. Other contributions of this thesis are the design and evaluation of a framework building on cloud and peer-to-peer technology to enable mobile sessions and an exploration of the concept of application mobility.