OmniStore: μηχανισμοί για την αυτοματοποίηση της διαχείρισης δεδομένων σε ένα προσωπικό σύστημα με πολλές φορητές συσκευές

Abstract

As the volume of data people generate, collect and use continuously grows, so do the burdens associated with conventional file management, which typically requires considerable user involvement. The large number of portable and embedded devices we carry with us, merely aggravate the situation. The scientific community has long stipulated that the computing systems that will pervade the human habitat will be designed to assist people in, rather than distract them from, their activities. This work contributes towards achieving this objective by reducing the complexity of file management in a personal computing environment comprising several portable devices with ad-hoc networking capability. To this end, we have designed and implemented OmniStore, a system that combines portable devices and infrastructure-based services to relieve the user from explicit and time consuming file management tasks. In Omnistore, all versions of all files created on any device are incrementally forwarded to a repository. Conversely, a file (and subsequent versions thereof) may be copied from the repository to any device, in an asynchronous and flexible way. Furthermore, portable devices collaborate with each other in the background to replicate files for increased availability, to migrate files for storage reclamation, and to provide transparent and fault-tolerant remote file access within the personal area network. New files are also annotated with context information generated from nearby devices, enabling their flexible organization and lookup. Notably, the mechanisms and protocols of OmniStore have been designed taking into account the intermittent nature of mobile and ad-hoc communication. As a basis of our system, we have developed a runtime environment which provides core facilities, such as service discovery, device co-location statistics, remote communication and context aggregation, paying special attention to the characteristics of personal area networks. The file management functionality is implemented on top of this runtime and is made available to the application programmer via a library that augments the conventional file system API with the necessary primitives.