Smews: a Dedicated Operating System
Supporting Web Applications
in Constrained Environment
PhD thesis defended on July 19 2010 in Villeneuve d'Ascq
Committee
- Gilles Grimaud,
LIFL, Université Lille 1 - Sciences et Technologies: advisor;
- Christine Morin,
IRISA, Université de Rennes 1: chairman;
- Didier Donsez,
LIG, Universite Joseph Fourier - Grenoble 1: reviewer;
- Pierre Sens,
LIP6, Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6: reviewer;
- Laurent Réveillère,
LaBRI, Institut Polytechnique de Bordeaux: member;
- Jean-Jacques Vandewalle,
CNFPT, École Nationale Supérieure
des Sciences de l'Information et des Bibliothèques: member.
The context of this thesis is the extension of Web technologies to ambient computing. The resulting
Web of Things allows novel interactions by guaranteeing interoperability at both network and applications levels. We address the design of the software system behaving as a Web server and embedded in strongly constrained devices such as smart cards or sensors. The state of the art solutions allowing to run a lightweight standard protocol stack involve poor performances and sacrifice the system features. The thesis is that by dedicating an operating system to the support of a high-level family of applications, we can produce an efficient software consuming a few resources while providing rich functionalities. We study an architecture based on an
macro-kernel integrating the hardware management, the communications stack and the applications container, providing an interface that fits the applications needs.
The proposals we present are based on a theoretical analysis and modeling of Web applications needs and have been experimentally validated thanks to our prototype, Smews. The topics we address include the adaptation of the communication stack behavior depending on executed applications properties, the cross-layer design of the event-driven kernel which allows fast processing while consuming few resources, the low-cost applicative coroutines management, the efficient and fair requests scheduling, the support of event notification as well as the overall system scalability.
Resources