Mobile applications make their move on the wireless edge
When Boeing’s Connexion in-flight Internet service begins its test rollouts this fall, it will give new meaning to the phrase “application delivery on the edge.” The project, designed to provide Internet connectivity and applications to passengers and crew at 30,000 feet above sea level, will use an innovative architecture to cache key application components and data onboard for access via the aircraft’s LAN.
The architecture will include a “ground server” that runs BEA Weblogic and Oracle on Solaris, plus an edge server on each aircraft consisting of an open-source jBoss application server running on Linux, and a small-scale IBM Cloudscape database. Synchronization between the two sets of servers will be handled by software from White Plains, N.Y.-based startup OP40, which provides middleware to distribute and synchronize applications and data across heterogeneous edge environments — typically mobile environments with intermittent connectivity.
As interest in edge delivery of applications grows, mobile environments are likely to provide early insight into key edge computing issues because much of the research on distributing applications and data out to the edge is being done for mobile environments. Specifically, business logic for message routing and data transformation (to accommodate a variety of end-user device formats) will increasingly be placed near the network edge, whether that edge is defined as an end-user device itself or as some kind of intermediate network, as in Boeing Connexion’s wireless LAN.
“Eighty [percent] or 90 percent of all the devices that are going to be used at the edge are going to be wireless,” predicts Hewlett-Packard’s CTO for software Rick Hayes-Roth, adding that he believes application logic will be spread across four infrastructure tiers, including origin servers, network pipes, wireless base stations, and intermittently connected wireless devices. Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP, among others, is developing middleware to distribute application components and data to the wireless edge and to synchronize them when a mobile user reaches a connectivity “hot spot.”
Applications using speech recognition, for example, will likely encode and encrypt voice on the end-user device and then send the data to an edge server for processing. “It won’t be possible for everybody to be calling the same speech-recognition server at the same location,” Hayes-Roth says. “The only reasonable thing to do is move most of the logic near to the end-user.”
Companies such as Research in Motion, Seven, and ViAir have already begun moving business logic out to the edges of wireless data networks, including e-mail routing rules and proxies. And wireless providers must increasingly distribute logic for transformations performed near the edge such as transformations from XML to WML (Wireless Markup Language), those for mobile phones, and secondary transformations to meet specific device attributes.
Middleware for distributing application components to the edge of mobile environments is likely to resemble edge server infrastructure in wired networks, with a focus on delayering applications and incorporating appropriate business rules for provisioning, synchronization, and replication.
“You want to maximize use of computing resources while maintaining the integrity of the application,” explains OP40 CTO Shuang Chen.
