ROCS: a remotely provisioned OSGi framework for ambient systems

One of the challenges of ambient systems lies in providing all the available services of the environment to the ambient devices, even if they do not physically host those services. Although this challenge has come to find a solution through cloud computing, there are still few devices and operating systems that enable applications execution by only uploading the required components into the runtime environment. The ROCS (Remote OSGi Caching Service) framework is a novel proposal which relies on a heavy-weighted standard Java/OSGi stack. It is distributed between class servers and ambient devices to provide full functionalities to resource-constrained environments. The ROCS framework provides improvements in two areas. First, it defines a minimal bootstrap environment that runs a standard Java/OSGi stack. Secondly, it provides an architecture for loading any necessary missing class from remote servers into memory at runtime. Our first results show similar performances when classes are either remotely downloaded into the main memory from a local network or from a flash drive. These results suggest a way to design minimalistic middleware that dynamically obtain their applications from the network as a first step towards cloud-aware operating systems.