Experience with adaptive mobile applications in Odyssey

Noble, B.D. and Satyanarayanan, M.

Abstract

In this paper, we present our experience with application-aware adaptation in the context of Odyssey, a platform for mobile data access.  We describe three applications that we have modified to run on Odyssey - a video player, a Web browser, and a speech recognition system.  Our experience indicates that it is relatively simple to incorporate applications into Odyssey, and that application source code is not always essential.  Although our applications were built without knowledge of each other, Odyssey is able to run them concurrently without interference.  However, our experience also exposes important areas of future work.  Specifically, it reveals the difficulty of balancing agility with stability in adaptation, and emphasizes the need for controlled exposure of internal Odyssey state to users.