An OSGi Based Service Architecture in The Context of Tag-to-MobiCloud Computing
Résumé
Mobile Cloud services offer a dynamic and efficient remote access to information services and resources, but they introduce at the same time, additional coupled interactions increasing complexity of the applications integration. In this dynamic and distributed environment, adding, updating or deleting instances can directly influence the current instances running on the Cloud.
Hence, the management of distributed components becomes in this context a real challenge. The OSGi framework with his bundle based model addresses very well these issues. With OSGi, components can easily be managed remotely thanks to the native support of the dynamic behavior of applications, and to the elasticity offered by a modular bundles management on the other hand.
We present a new OSGi-based SOA framework to design Android applications based on OSGi bundles. Our solutions target to develop a component-based software package that implements the service-component model with modularity and reusability capabilities. These solutions make Android platforms more dynamic by providing SOA features such as dynamic class-loading, versioning management, and dynamic bundle configuration avoiding the Android platform restart. In fact, we have defined a middleware to launch Felix, a compact implementation of OSGi, on Android terminals, and to manage the life cycle of the bundles that are used by Android applications. We have then extended the use of OSGi bundles from the mobile local environment execution to a distributed mobile Cloud environment so that the mobile cloud architecture is based completely on OSGi service model.
To allow interaction between Android platforms bundles and the cloud services, we installed R-OSGi on the cloud side and we integrate within Android platforms R-OSGi as a proxy bundle service. Hence, an OSGi bundle is considered as a Cloud service?s deployment unit. The cloud provider exposes the services that can be managed on a distributed and autonomous way with OSGi bundles management System.
To illustrate the use of OSGi remote services hosted on a cloud, we have developed an application that runs on NFC cell phones. The application that reads the product ID from a tag, searches this ID in a remote data base through a call to a local bundle. The local bundle then performs a remote call through R-OSGi to the cloud and carries the cloud?s response to the Android application.