The Proximal Workspace Architecture for Wearable I/O-Device Cloud Applications

We describe a new enhanced cloud computing architecture, called the Proximal Workspace, to allow access and interaction between lightweight wearable I/O devices, e.g., video glasses, earphones, wrist displays, body sensors, etc., and ubiquitous applications that represent a new generation of computation-and-data-intensive programs. While wearable devices offer an easy way for these applications to collect user data and offer feedback, the applications cannot be run natively and completely on these devices because of high resource demands. Making these applications available via a cloud, while promoting ubiquitous access and providing the necessary resources to execute the applications, induces large delays due to network latency.

The Proximal Workspace provides nearby computing power to the user’s devices and thus mediates between them and the cloud’s computing resources. The workspace is designed to run any subset of activities that cannot be run on a user’s device due to computation speed or storage size, and cannot be run on a cloud server due to network latency. We also describe a powerful abstraction for networked communication, called Networked Device Drivers, which provide the underlying communication support for Proximal Workspaces in a way that promotes simplicity and transparency.