University of Houston
Department of Computer Science
In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science
Yogesh Chopra
will defend his thesis
COMPARISON OF COMPONENT-BASED ADAPTATION TO IN-APPLICATION ADAPTATION
Abstract
The need for adaptation in mobile and wireless environments is well
established. Puppeteer is a component-based adaptation system that changes
the behavior of applications for bandwidth limited networks. Puppeteer uses
the APIs exported by the application and the document structure exposed by
the application, and is thus limited by the overheads of APIs and the
limitations of the document structure. In order to quantify the overheads of
using the API, we changed the source code of applications to perform the same
adaptive actions from inside the application. We refer to this approach as the
In-Application adaptation system. This thesis work describes the design and
implementation of an In-Application adaptation system based on
SUN Microsystems OpenOffice suite.
Using Puppeteer and In-Application adaptation, we perform a head-to-head
comparison of the overhead one incurs using APIs, and answer some
questions such as: are we limited by the APIs and document structure of
applications? Performance results indicate that the In-Application
adaptation system is capable of reducing latency by about 75% for
application-specific adaptation policies. Comparisons reveal, however, that
Puppeteer incurs only 6% more adaptation costs in the worst case as compared
to the In-Application adaptation approach. The APIs exported by the
application are sufficient to implement powerful adaptation policies and the
net savings achieved due to latency reduction of In-Application approach are
acceptable. Therefore, we do not advocate modifying complex
application source code for the purposes of adaptation.
Date: Tuesday, April 9, 2002
Time: 6:00 PM
Place: 550-PGH
Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Venkat Subramaniam