Exploring a New Dimension in Code Mobility for Ubiquitous Embedded Systems

The emerging field of reconfigurable computing is currently blurring the boundary between hardware and software layers in computer systems, enabling the extension of traditionally software design paradigms, such as code mobility, to hardware-reconfigurable systems. Motivated by this consideration, we introduce in this paper an extended notion of code mobility -deep mobility- which takes into consideration the possibility to migrate "logical" hardware components of reconfigurable systems across a distributed infrastructure. We present a general architecture of a mobility-aware hardware-reconfigurable system as well as a prototypical implementation which provides full support to deep code mobility while hiding the complexity of the hardware reconfiguration process. An application scenario is also described showing how the different dimensions of code mobility introduced by this work can benefit real-world distributed applications.