Type of Document	Dissertation
Author	Adhikari, Sameer
URN	etd-10062004-155709
Title	Programming Idioms and Runtime Mechanisms for Distributed Pervasive Computing
Degree	Doctor of Philosophy
Department	Computing
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title Umakishore Ramachandran Committee Chair Brian Cooper Committee Member Calton Pu Committee Member Karsten Schwan Committee Member Raj Kumar Committee Member
Keywords	event reasoning temporal data middleware runtime system pervasive computing distributed computing
Date of Defense	2004-08-17
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract The emergence of pervasive computing power and networking infrastructure is enabling new applications. Still, many milestones need to be reached before pervasive computing becomes an integral part of our lives. An important missing piece is the middleware that allows developers to easily create interesting pervasive computing applications. This dissertation explores the middleware needs of distributed pervasive applications. The main contributions of this thesis are the design, implementation, and evaluation of two systems: D-Stampede and Crest. D-Stampede allows pervasive applications to access live stream data from multiple sources using time as an index. Crest allows applications to organize historical events, and to reason about them using time, location, and identity. Together they meet the important needs of pervasive computing applications. D-Stampede supports a computational model called the thread-channel graph. The threads map to computing devices ranging from small to high-end processing elements. Channels serve as the conduits among the threads, specifically tuned to handle time-sequenced streaming data. D-Stampede allows the dynamic creation of threads and channels, and for the dynamic establishment (and removal) of the plumbing among them. The Crest system assumes a universe that consists of participation servers and event stores, supporting a set of applications. Each application consists of distributed software entities working together. The participation server helps the application entities to discover each other for interaction purposes. Application entities can generate events, store them at an event store, and correlate events. The entities can communicate with one another directly, or indirectly through the event store. We have qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated D-Stampede and Crest. The qualitative aspect refers to the ease of programming afforded by our programming abstractions for pervasive applications. The quantitative aspect measures the cost of the API calls, and the performance of an application pipeline that uses the systems.
Files	Filename       Size       Approximate Download Time (Hours:Minutes:Seconds)     28.8 Modem   56K Modem   ISDN (64 Kb)   ISDN (128 Kb)   Higher-speed Access    adhikari_sameer_200412_phd.pdf 1.00 Mb 00:04:38 00:02:23 00:02:05 00:01:02 00:00:05