A Cross Platform Computing Method and Its Application for Mobile Device in Transparent Computing

Recently, the fact that mobile devices with various kinds of hardware and software platforms constantly appear on the market has resulted in huge amount of mobile applications coming out based on different platforms. Thus a big challenge has emerged to design applications on the heterogeneous devices and operating systems (OSes). This paper proposes a completely cross platform mobile transparent computing (CPMTC) method to make it possible for mobile devices to support various operating systems and application programs from underlying platform to application perspective based on the concept of transparent computing on PC. On the underlying platform of mobile device, a mobile pre-boot firmware (MPBF) is designed to initialize the mobile device and stream the OS image data to device through network. Within the firmware program, multiple OSes image data are able to be loaded on demand at runtime. In order to provide the cross platform support on the application layer, we develop an application design method based on HTML5 using the transparent server to manage the application and user data, and apply it to the e-Learning system. We deploy the MPBF on the experimental tablet, and then load different OSes into the tablet using the MPBF. After that, we run and evaluate the e-learning system over every loaded OS. The practical experiment results confirm that the CPMTC can be taken as the effective method to decouple not only OSes from hardware but also application programs from OS in mobile devices.