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Dynamic Application Protocol Adaptation in
Heterogeneous Environments

Dr Weisong Shi
Wayne State University

Date:  Friday, November 11, 2005

Host: L. Xiao

Abstract: The rapid growth of heterogeneous devices and diverse networks in our daily life, makes it is very difficult, if not impossible, to build a one-size-fits-all application or protocol, which can run well in such a dynamic environment. Adaptation has been considered as a general approach to address the mismatch problem between clients and servers; however, we envision that the missing part, which is also a big challenge, is how to inject and deploy adaptation functionality into the environment. In this talk, we propose a novel application level protocol adaptation framework, Fractal, which uses the mobile code technology for protocol adaptation and leverages existing content distribution networks (CDN) for protocol adaptors (mobile codes) deployment. To the best of our knowledge, Fractal is the first application level protocol adaptation framework that considers the real deployment problem using mobile code and content distribution networks. To evaluate the proposed framework, we have implemented two case studies: an adaptive message encryption protocol and an adaptive communication optimization protocol. In the adaptive message encryption protocol, Fractal always chooses a proper encryption algorithm according to different application requirements and device characteristics. And the adaptive communication optimization protocol is capable of dynamically selecting the best one from four communication protocols, including Direct sending, Gzip, Bitmap, and Vary-sized blocking, for different hardware and network configurations. In comparison with other adaptation approaches, evaluation results show the proposed adaptive approach performs very well on both the client side and server side.

Biography: Dr. Weisong Shi is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Wayne State University . He received his B. S. from Xidian University in 1995, and Ph.D. degree from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2000, both in Computer Engineering. His current research focuses on mobile computing, trusted resource sharing in peer-to-peer systems, content delivery, and wireless sensor networks. He is the author of the book "Performance Optimization of Software Distributed Shared Memory Systems". He is a recipient of Microsoft Fellowship in 1999, the President outstanding award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2000, one of 100 outstanding Ph.D. dissertations (China) in 2002, ``Faculty Research Award'' of Wayne State University in 2004 and 2005, the ``Best Paper Award'' of ICWE'04 and IEEE IPDPS'05.