DISHES: A Distributed Shell System Designed for Ubiquitous Computing Environment

摘要

This paper presents the design of the distributed shell system, DISHES, which serves as an interface middleware between a mobile user and ambient computers. With DISHES, a user can issue a command containing a sequence of programs and location of data to his mobile device, and the mobile device will retrieve the data from the specified location and automatically look for the required programs to process the data from the computing environment. Thus, a complicated task may be accomplished by gluing several primitive programs. These primitive programs may be executed on the more powerful computers nearby for better performance, and the results will be returned to the user. With this approach, the hardware and software of a mobile device may be kept as simple as possible; and thus the development costs may be reduced. We also propose a polynomial algorithm for finding a sequence of computers to execute the specified programs with the minimum network delay.