Distributed Java Support for Mobile Applications on

Lightweight Devices
K.A.Hawick and H.A.James
Computer Science Division, School of Informatics
University of Wales, Bangor, North Wales, LL57 1UT, UK
{hawick,heath}@bangor.ac.uk
Tel: +44 1248 38 2717, Fax: +44 1248 36 1429

Keywords: Java; mobile application; PDA; dis-
tributed applications; middleware.
Extended Abstract
Mobile computers and personal digital assistants
are now widely affordable and are powerful enough
to run paradigm shifting mobile applications and
support programming environments like Java. We
are investigating the support services and software
infrastructure that is needed for the next gener-
ation of mobile users and applications that will
use such devices. As well as email, messaging and
web based applications that are already prevalent
on wireless laptops and PDAs we are investigating
context-aware applications that play an active role
on their users’ behalf and taking actions dependent
upon spatial and temporal information. Systems
such as Fox’s Garnet environment have shown that
mobile chat and collaborative environments can be
built using PDAs and Java and message-oriented
middleware.
Java is a particularly attractive development en-
vironment for smart mobile applications allowing
for a considerably richer higher level set of devel-
opment libraries and components than would be
possible using traditional embedded systems lan-
guages.
In this paper we consider two mobile user appli-
cation categories. Firstly the mobile householder or
office based worker or scientist who is mobile within
the context of one or more building zones and who
might wish to interact with devices and other users
in his/her environment. Secondly we consider a
field worker who might be a field scientist gather-
ing data or a soldier in a battlefield scenario. This
sort of user is working in a more hostile environ-
ment with more likelihood of poor network coverage
or temporary disruption to services. He/she might
wish to operate in “nomadic” mode between peri-
ods of connectivity. We wish to add mobile location
context to a smart agent based software infrastruc-
ture to allow more pro-active mobile applications.
We also consider the necessary mobile support en-
vironment from the perspective of a smart mobile
device. We are working with swarm based mobile
networked robots [7] which have similar computa-
tional power to a PDA but which carry sensors and
are controlled by an agent based software system.
Our goal is to investigate the issues surrounding
a interoperating mobile software support structure
that can be scaled to cope with large numbers of
participating nodes - both humans represented by
their PDA proxies and robots represented by agent
based control systems. In this paper we discuss the
Java support environments we have experimented
with; the performance of the base components and
our observed trends for mobile Java; and our ar-
chitecture for a mobile support environment us-
ing Java: network; thread; introspection and com-
munications packages. We also discuss our use of
WaveLAN and Bluetooth communications systems
from Java and also the use of location context in-
formation to enrich potential mobile applications
behaviour [6]..
Java on Mobile Devices
Support for Java on embedded devices is develop-
ing quite rapidly. At the time of writing, Sun’s Java
2 Micro Edition(J2ME) and associated specifica-
tion has two main strands. A Specification known
as PersonalJava is being incorporated into the aus-
pices of the J2ME framework but is already a useful
specification. It has been implemented Insignia for
their Jeode Java product and environment for the
Compaq PDA [1]. Other companies have similar
products for other PDAs. We also employ another
JVM product based upon Sun’s J2ME framework.
The KVM specification underpins the Java envi-
ronment supported by Dallas Semiconductors on
their Tiny Internet Interface (Tini) device [2]. This
control board with up to 1 MB of memory runs
a communications rich system with Java software
able to access ethernet; 1-wire; serial port and In-
ter IC communications protocols. The KVM takes
its name (apparently) because of its achievement of
cramming a JVM into 100’s of kBytes rather than
MBytes.
We are employing the Tini and associated Java
system into our mobile swarm robots where a very
simplified control software infrastructure runs on
the Tini as master to various device microcon-
trollers. The mobile robots communicate with one
another via wireless ethernet at present although
we are working on a Bluetooth accessible commu-
nications system for them. A fixed network base
station act as as a communications broker and an
interface to the Internet-ed world. We have used
similar technology for implementing wireless net-
works of sensors devices [5], again controlled by
small Java applications.
Java Performance Trends
We have carried out benchmark tests of the Com-
paq iPAQ PDA Jeode JVM performance in key ar-
eas for our mobile middleware. Preliminary results
suggest that for integer and memory operations the
iPAQ runs approximately 10 times slower than a
medium range 1GHz PC running unoptimised Java
code/JVMs. This is encouraging and since it seems
inevitable that mobile devices will continue to im-
prove in speed with Moore’s Law we may see sim-
ilar capabilities as todays desktops in the not too
distant future.
It is not clear what compromises to make in de-
veloping experimental software infrastructures for
mobile systems. In general the complexity of the
protocols and interaction models amongst mobile
users and their proxy applications means that Java
is a fairly low risk development platform. It is
likely that communications libraries of greater per-
formance and richer capabilities will allow services
and common applications components to be pushed
down into a support middleware structure. The de-
vices and systems available today are certainly ad-
equate for experimentation in new protocols, dis-
tributed algorithms such as consensus agreements
and leader elections.
Multi-threaded Mobile Peers
We have experimented for some years with multi-
threaded Java based daemons for middleware sup-
port on fixed network distributed systems. We are
presently working with a lightweight version of our
DISCWorld [4] Java daemon that can run as a peer
on PDAs such as the Compaq iPAQ. Our program
is capable of running as both a graphically interac-
tive client program as well as a lightweight server
encapsulating various agent components that inter-
act with other nodes on the mobile user’s behalf.
Our original DISCWorld system was written us-
ing a relatively large number of threads and it used
a workflow based model to support user jobs in the
form of task graphs. Successful use of the Java
threads model requires some care to avoid dead-
lock and other resource allocation problems [9]. For
“DISCWorld Lite” we have had to redesign the
thread model we employ to cope with the limits
on thread numbers supported by by the Pocket PC
OS and hence the PersonalJava JVM we rely upon
on the Compaq iPAQ. We had designed a Java
lightweight message-passing system [10] for use in
parallel programs and have been able to re-engineer
this to enable lightweight message passing within a
mobile network.
We will report on our software architecture in de-
tail in the full paper. In brief our system consists of
some infrastructural thread components that: bro-
ker communications; ensure security and manage
aggressively cached and hoards local objects. In
addition a thread factory (re)uses data query satis-
fying and production components. We will compare
the message and threading performance of our full
and Lite DISCWorld daemon systems.
Java Wireless Communications
Our initial experiments have used IEEE 802.11b
wireless network technology which can support nor-
mal LAN IP operations accessible to the Java net-
work programming stack on devices such as the
iPAQ. Recent PDAs such as the iPAQ model 3970
come equipped with Bluetooth wireless communi-
cations. The Bluetooth communications system is
designed to support personal area communications
over the range of a few metres. Mobile phones and
PDAs are already available with appropriate com-
munications applications allowing users to operate
a personal area or body area network whereby their
mobile devices can all interact. Of great interest to
us is the potential for Bluetooth PDAs to inter-
act with ground station devices and thus obtaining
very localised spatial information. This additional
contextual information supports many interesting
new applications and interactions between the lo-
cation aware software agents on the PDA and its
environment.
We anticipate that global positioning systems
(GPS) will soon become light, cheap and accurate
enough that PDAs will have spatial context data
available to them. In the meantime Bluetooth com-
munications will allow us to experiment with the
necessary support software infrastructure and the
sociological usage patterns that we need to under-
stand before we can take full advantage of being
fully connected and location enabled mobile users.
Other projects such as Cricket are looking at elec-
tronics devices that can provide very localised sig-
nals inside buildings [11].
The proposed Bluetooth Java API [8] provides
some interesting device discovery and interaction
methods over and above the conventional message
and streaming communications supported for wire-
less ethernets. We are investigating how a Java
agent based system can make use of such a model
to establish ad hoc networks of mobile users that
need not require a nearby fixed network device.
Preliminary finding suggest that performance
trends for Java on mobile devices are encourag-
ing and that there is great scope for a smart agent
based active infrastructure in support of mobile ap-
plications and users.
Acknowledgements
[10] J.A. Mathew, H.A. James and K.A. Haw-
The Distributed and High Performance Comput-
ing Group is a collaborative venture between the
University of Wales, Bangor and the University of
Adelaide in South Australia.
[11] Nissanka B. Priyantha, Anit Chakraborty,
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