XenITH: Xen in the Hand

Usability and portability have been key commercial drivers for increasingly capable handheld devices, which have been enabled by advances in Moore’s Law and well as in wireless systems. The nature of such devices makes them extremely personal, and yet they offer an untapped resource for new forms of peer-to-peer and cooperative communications relaying. Taking advantage of such capabilities requires concurrent resource control of the handheld’s computational and communications capacities. Virtualization platforms, such as the Xen system, have opened the possibility of multiplexing a handheld device in useful and unobtrusive ways, as personal applications can be used while additional services such as decentralized communications are also in operation. The purpose of this project is to experimentally demonstrate the ability of modern smartphone units to support a programmable network environment. We attempt to validate the system with a series of measurement experiments which demonstrate concurrent use of two operating systems, each using computational and network resources, in two virtual machines. Moreover, we demonstrate an acceptable level of user performance while maintaining a MANET using a programmable network router.