An Agent Framework for CE Devices to Support Storage Virtualization on Device Ensembles

The problem of accessing and managing digital contents scattered on personal portable devices such as smart phone, digital camera, MP3 player, or laptop in an integrated fashion is critical in ubiquitous computing. It is not trivially solvable because the underlying networks are dynamically configured and the data types supported by each device are constrained. Due to recent rapid growth in personal digital contents, it becomes a major issue. To address this challenge, we have proposed a self-managed distributed file services called PosCFS+ in personal area networks (PAN). PosCFS+ automatically detects every device available in PAN and integrates the storage space of all the devices into a virtual storage. In order to facilitate data access to the virtual storage, PosCFS+ creates virtual directories which enable a semantic file addressing from applications. However, in a real world consisting of multiple consumer electronics (CE) devices, it is not easy or even impossible to install software components like PosCFS+ in the CE devices because they are proprietary. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a CE device agent which enables the storage virtualization by PosCFS+ on CE device ensembles. Most CE devices are connected to a host computer via USB interface, so the agent will be executed on the host computer to export the physical storage space of a CE device to PosCFS+. Then, virtual storages and virtual directories are created by PosCFS+ according to predefined user profile. Finally, to solve the problem of limited data type and format supported in a CE device, the event notification framework proposed is used for automatic data transcoding.