Georgia Institute of Technology
In part funded by the Yamacraw effort
Distributed and embedded systems have limited resources, often due to cost considerations. Furthermore, resource availability and user needs change continuously, driven by user behavior or external changes such as interference in wireless communications. Our group is developing flexible technologies to deal with dynamic resource changes and to exploit and adjust to runtime changes in user needs, with the goal of leveraging both in order to improve the experiences of end users. The target environments of our work include (1) wired homes in which high end data (e.g., video) transfers and computations (e.g., video analysis as needed in home security, or immersive, multi-player games) are ongoing and (2) wireless environments in which end users interact continuously, via portable and wireless devices.
The research areas being investigated address specific
devices like PDAs and laptops and the wireless communication media they
employ, with research topics ranging from (1) the creation of middleware
that promotes the effective distributed programming of these target platforms
(both using Java and also investigating higher performance middleware),
to (2) extending the Linux kernel at runtime in order to dynamically configure
its use in embedded and ubiquitous systems, to (3) investigating specific
extensions including those of protocol stacks to improve certain applications'
operation. Artifacts resulting from our work include the JECho
and ECho middleware
systems, the ASAN project investigating how to improve communication co-processor
firmware, the ELinux project constructing an extensible Linux for embedded
systems, and 'quality channels', a layer on top of Microsoft NT, ELinux
, and configurable firmware; this layer exploits the configuration options
offered by lower system levels, thereby shielding end users from having
to understand system-level details. Finally, runtime monitoring extensions
being developed for ELinux observe both communication behavior and processing
behavior, so that runtime configuration can take advantage of knowledge
about both.
Related Papers
People
Karsten Schwan
Lynn Daley
Greg Eisenhauer
Jasmina Jancic
Christian Poellabauer
David Robinson
Richard West
Dong Zhou
Related Projects
Echo
JEcho
ELinux
ASAN
Yamacraw
Collaborations
Southern Polytechnic State University
University of Georgia