iMASH: Interactive Mobile Application Session Handoff

Mobile computing research has often focused on untethering an in-use computing device, rather than enabling the mobility of the computation task itself. This paper presents an architecture, implementation, and experimental evidence that together validate a new continuous computing concept, application session handoff. The iMASH architecture leverages previous work on proxies, content adaptation, and client awareness to provide a unique, middleware-enabled capability for continuous computing. Implementation in both socket- and RPC-based environments shows that very fast, secure session handoff of non-trivial client/server applications across heterogeneous client devices and networks is feasible: experiments on a number of applications produced handoff latencies ranging from 0.5s to 2s.