A Self-Adaptive Hardware/Software System Architecture for Ubiquitous Computing Applications

Within ubiquitous computing environments, services and devices can be dynamically adapted to changing conditions, and thus adaptivity becomes a key requirement in providing possibly better system performance. Most existing ubiquitous computing systems either support only software adaptation or manage reconfigurable hardware functions as conventional hardware devices. As a result, system adaptation and performance improvement are still restricted. To provide more robust system adaptation, we propose a self-adaptive hardware/software system architecture (SAHA) that consists of service suppliers, a hardware adapter, a system manager, an observer, and a reconfigurable hardware architecture. Further, SAHA supports both hardware preemption and hardware virtualization within a complete self-aware system adaptation mechanism such that the utilization of system resources is enhanced and better performance is provided for ubiquitous computing applications. Experiments with a ubiquitous computing service for information encryption demonstrate that SAHA can reduce the turnaround time by at least 11.9% of that required by using the conventional method.