Environment server: A system support for adaptive distributed applications

Various new types of applications can be available in future computing environments such as mobile computing environments and ubiquitous computing environments. The applications may change our daily life dramatically since computers can be embedded in our daily necessaries such as televisions, microwaves, cameras, and air conditioners. In these environments, computing environments can be changed dramatically, and applications may be migrated among computers that have drastically different hardware configurations. Therefore, these applications should be adapted to various computing environments that may have dramatically different characteristics for their efficient executions, and the adaptation requires that the applications can access information about computing environments through a uniform interface. In this paper, we propose an environment server that is important as a basic infrastructure for building adaptive applications for future computing environments. The environment server manages various information about computing environments in an integrated fashion, and applications can access these information through its well defined interface. This makes it possible to build adaptive applications with a systematic framework.