Tag Archives: thingsjs

ThingsMigrate: Platform‐independent migration of stateful JavaScript Internet of Things applications

Jung, K., Gascon‐Samson, J., Goyal, S., Rezaiean‐Asel, A., Pattabiraman, K. (2021) ThingsMigrate: Platform‐independent migration of stateful JavaScript Internet of Things applications. Software: Practice and Experience, 51(1), pp.117-155.
[Preprint]

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained wide popularity both in academic and industrial contexts. Unlike traditional embedded devices with specialized firmwares, modern IoT devices accommodate general‐purpose operating systems, allowing developers to run more sophisticated applications written in high‐level languages like JavaScript. Because IoT devices are subject to resource constraints like available battery power, we need to dynamically migrate a running process between different devices to prevent losing state. However, it is challenging to apply migration techniques using memory snapshots across the heterogeneous pool of IoT devices. We present ThingsMigrate, a middleware providing platform‐independent migration of JavaScript processes across IoT devices. Prior to execution, ThingsMigrate instruments the source code of a given program to expose its internal state. During run‐time, the transformed program produces on demand a JSON snapshot of its current state, from which new code is generated to resume execution. Thus, ThingsMigrate enables process migration entirely in the application space without any modifications to the underlying virtual machine (VM), providing VM‐independence. We present three versions of ThingsMigrate, each building on the previous to optimize for run‐time latency and memory consumption. We report on the experience of building each successive version and discuss the insights gained and the learning outcomes. We evaluated ThingsMigrate against standard benchmarks, over two IoT platforms and a cloud‐like environment. We show that it can migrate even highly CPU‐intensive applications, with average run‐time latency overhead of 33% and memory overhead of 78%. ThingsMigrate supports multiple subsequent migrations without introducing additional overhead over each subsequent migration.

Demo: ThingsMigrate – Platform-Independent Live-Migration of JavaScript Processes

Jung K., Gascon-Samson, J., Pattabiraman K. (2018) Demo: ThingsMigrate – Platform-Independent Live-Migration of JavaScript Processes, 2018 IEEE/ACM Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC 2018), Seattle, WA, USA
[Preprint] [Video]

Abstract: Recent trends in IoT (Internet of Things) has seen increasing number of devices being shipped with full-fledged operating systems, allowing more complex and stateful applications written in high-level languages (e.g., JavaScript) to be run on the edge. The benefits of pushing computations towards the edge is that one can reduce the network costs of data transmission. Just like any other distributed system, we need to guarantee in IoT the availability of running processes, and thus need a live-migration mechanism for such programs. However, well-studied VM migration techniques are costly and impractical in IoT, due to the resource constraints and diversity of devices. In this demo paper, we present a demo of ThingsMigrate, a JavaScript middleware for enabling live-migration of stateful JavaScript applications in a platform-independent manner, along with a web dashboard used to monitor and control the IoT devices.

Poster: Towards a Distributed and Self-Adaptable Cloud-Edge Middleware

Gascon-Samson, J., Jung K., Pattabiraman K. (2018) Poster: Towards a Distributed and Self-Adaptable Cloud-Edge Middleware, 2018 IEEE/ACM Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC 2018), Seattle, WA, USA
[Preprint] [Poster]

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) landscape has grown tremendously over the past few years. Modern devices are getting more powerful, and are therefore gaining the ability to execute complex and rich applications (edge computing), which can yield many benefits compared to traditional, cloud-centric models. On the other end, the use of high-level languages (e.g., JavaScript) allows programmers to abstract low-level considerations, and gives the ability to run the same code across different platforms. In this paper, we describe the main features of ThingsJS, our comprehensive self-adaptive cloud-edge middleware that allows for designing and running high-level, complex applications written in JavaScript on the IoT devices themselves.

ThingsMigrate: Platform-Independent Migration of Stateful JavaScript IoT Applications

Gascon-Samson, J., Jung, K., Goyal, S., Rezaiean-Asel, A., Pattabiraman, K. (2018) ThingsMigrate: Platform-Independent Migration of Stateful JavaScript IoT Applications, ECOOP 2018, Amsterdam, Netherlands [Preprint] [Presentation Slides] [Poster]

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained wide popularity both in academic and industrial contexts. As IoT devices become increasingly powerful, they can run more and more complex applications written in higher-level languages, such as JavaScript. However, by their nature, IoT devices are subject to resource constraints, which require applications to be dynamically migrated between devices (and the cloud). Further, IoT applications are also becoming more stateful, and hence we need to save their state during migration transparently to the programmer. In this paper, we present ThingsMigrate, a middleware providing VM-independent migration of stateful JavaScript applications across IoT devices. ThingsMigrate captures and reconstructs the internal JavaScript program state by instrumenting application code before run time, without modifying the underlying Virtual Machine (VM), thus providing platform and VM-independence. We evaluated ThingsMigrate against standard benchmarks, and over two IoT platforms and a cloud-like environment. We show that it can successfully migrate even highly CPU-intensive applications, with acceptable overheads (about 30%), and supports multiple migrations.

ThingsJS: Towards a Flexible and Self-Adaptable Middleware for Dynamic and Heterogeneous IoT Environments

Gascon-Samson, J., Rafiuzzaman M., Pattabiraman K. (2017) ThingsJS: Towards a Flexible and Self-Adaptable Middleware for Dynamic and Heterogeneous IoT Environments, Middleware for IoT (m4iot)@Middleware 2017, Las Vegas, USA
[Preprint] [Presentation Slides]

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained wide popularity both in academic and industrial contexts. Nowadays, such systems exhibit many important challenges across many dimensions. In this work, we propose ThingsJS, a rich Javascript-based middleware platform and runtime environment that abstracts the inherent complexity of such systems by providing a high-level framework for IoT system developers, built over Javascript. ThingsJS abstracts several large-scale distributed systems considerations, such as scheduling, monitoring and self-adaptation, by means of a rich constraint model, a multi-dimensional resource prediction approach and a SMT-based scheduler to properly schedule and manage the execution of high-level, large-scale distributed applications on heterogeneous physical IoT devices. ThingsJS also provides a rich inter-device communication framework built on top of the widely-used publish/subscribe/MQTT paradigm. Finally, ThingsJS also proposes a rich inter-device Javascript-based code migration framework to support the transparent migration of live IoT components between heterogeneous devices.

SmartJS: Dynamic and Self-Adaptable Runtime Middleware for Next-Generation IoT Systems (Poster)

Gascon-Samson, J., Rafiuzzaman M., Pattabiraman K. (2017) SmartJS: Dynamic and Self-Adaptable Runtime Middleware for Next-Generation IoT Systems (Poster), SPLASH 2017, Vancouver, Canada
[Preprint] [Poster]

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained wide popularity both in the academic and industrial contexts. However, IoT-based systems exhibit many important challenges across many dimensions. In this work, we propose SmartJS, a rich Javascript-based middleware platform and runtime environment that abstracts the complexity of the various IoT platforms by providing a high-level framework for IoT system developers. SmartJS abstracts large-scale distributed system considerations, such as scheduling, monitoring and self-adaptation, and proposes a rich inter-device Javascript-based code migration framework. Finally, it provides debugging and monitoring techniques to analyze performance and observe system-wide security properties.