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Supporting user mobility with Web-based Mobile Computing

University of British Columbia

Recent years have seen the proliferation of mobile computing researches that address the various problems when a device moves from place to place. However, this thesis deals with an additional degree of mobility called user mobility: the ability of users to access their own resources and run their favorite applications, from anywhere using any devices, still in the same way as his own personal computing environment. A novel computing model called Web-based Mobile Computing (WebMC) is proposed in this thesis to solve the challenges in supporting user mobility such as heterogeneous environment and running local applications using the user's personal settings. In this computing model, a user's personal computing environment is platformindependent and described by an XML document written in a standard vocabulary. Using this document, a web-browser-based, platform-dependent middleware sitting on a WebMC enabled client terminal would enable the user to access his own personal computing environment and run his own favorite applications with his own personal settings. WebMC defines this interface by giving the standard vocabulary. A prototype middleware has been developed on Linux and Mozilla to prove the feasibility and usability of WebMC. In this prototype, a distinct file system called XIFS is created to provide to web-top applications transparent access of user's personal environment files, using the XML document as its meta information.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-08-05

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/11712

Computer Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace