Pervasive Computing with Frugal Objects

This paper presents a computing model for resource-limited mobile devices that might be ubiquitously deployed in private and business environments. The model integrates a strongly-typed event-based communication paradigm with abstractions for frugal control, assuming a small footprint runtime. With our model, an application consists of a set of distributed reactive objects, called Frugal Objects (FROBs), that communicate through typed events and dynamically adapt their behavior according to notifications about changes in resource availability. FROBs have a logical time-slicing execution pattern that helps monitor resource consuming tasks and determine resource profiles in terms of CPU, memory, battery and bandwidth. The behavior of a FROB is represented by a set of stateless first-class objects. Both state and behavioral objects are referenced through a level of indirection within the FROB. This facilitates the dynamic changes of the set of event types a FROB can accept, say based on the available resources, without requiring a significant footprint increase of the underlying FROB runtime.