Ambient Virtio: IO Virtualization for Seamless Integration and Access of Devices in Ambient Computing

Abstract

Ambient computing creates a digital environment where a variety of technologies, including hardware, software, and even machine learning, are integrated into most useful and autonomous digital device that we want to use right here right now. The main obstacle for this computing is a barrier of vendor-specific details, programming interfaces, and access procedure even though all the things come to have network interfaces and interact with each other through the Internet. However, this configuration defies the expectation that ambient computing can reduce the demand for human attention. In this article, we propose Ambient Virtio, a device virtualization technology that virtualizes devices with the virtio framework. This allows devices in close proximity to users to be accessed without human intervention and integrated into metadevices that users want to create and access on the fly. We newly defined a virtio-based backend device named virtio-ambient and also constructed an ambient device architecture for virtual machines to read and write the remote device only with built-in system calls. We completely implemented the system and performed comparative evaluation with the existing application-level data networking system.