CID3: System Support for Loosely-Coupled Personal Computing Environments

A personal computing environment is comprised of a set of components that include processors, storage devices, networking support, and peripheral devices. This paper identifies the key functionalities needed to build a loosely- coupled, anywhere, anytime personal computing environment and then describes the design of a middleware service called CID3 (Coordinated Integration of Dynamically Discovered Devices) that provides system-level support for implementing those functionalities. CID3 has been designed to run on a variety of computing devices ranging from small mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs to larger, resource-rich devices such as laptops and desktops. A prototype of CID3 has been implemented, and the paper reports on an evaluation of this prototype.