ATM: A Framework to Support Application State Migration in Multiple Terminals Environment

Abstract

Nowadays, users are relying on mobile service ecosystem for their daily life, while there is a lack of support for users to efficiently migrate their tasks across different terminals. Furthermore, the same application running on different terminals may even have different layouts to guarantee the user experience, which makes the migration more difficult. To facilitate the switching among multiple terminals, in this paper, we present a service-based framework to support the service migration in multi-Terminal environment. First, we propose the application state migration meta-model to formally describe the application migration between different terminals, including a workflow-based application model to model the application's process and a migration model to support the dynamic migration. Based on the meta-model, we then develop the application framework to support the entire migration process of applications, consisting of the application encapsulation tool and the migration engine to enable the multi-Terminal switching for the existing applications. The experiments including two real cases show that our approach can effectively simplify user operation and significantly reduce the switching time. Our ATM can greatly improve the quality of experience (QoE) of users.