ACES - Application Cloud for Embedded Systems

As clouding computing emerges and brings new paradigms in the development and deployment of software, an inevitable issue would be the deployment and the execution of existing application software, not necessarily legacy ones, in an environment of cloud computing. The issue becomes even more challenging in satisfying users of embedded system products due to the characteristics of resource limitation and platform variety of such products. This paper presents an application cloud system, namely ACES (short for Application Cloud for Embedded Systems), which would be an effective approach to offloading the execution of applications from embedded system platforms to the cloud and helps transit to cloud computing. ACES allows existing applications, which are not developed for cloud computing, to be deployed on the server side in a cloud computing environment and to be executed, through operating a browser, from embedded system platforms on the client side. There is no need either to modify or to port the existing applications in the deployment. Neither is there any plug-in support required for the browser used. An implementation of ACES, of which X window applications are selected to be the existing applications, is described in this paper. It serves as an example to demonstrate how ACES works.