2013 Reports

Enabling the Virtual Phones to remotely sense the Real Phones in real-time: A Sensor Emulation initiative for virtualized Android-x86

Santhanam, Raghavan

Smartphones nowadays have the ground-breaking features that were only a figment of one’s imagination. For the ever-demanding cellphone users, the exhaustive list of features that a smartphone supports just keeps getting more exhaustive with time. These features aid one’s personal and professional uses as well. Extrapolating into the future the features of a present-day smartphone, the lives of us humans using smartphones are going to be unimaginably agile. With the above said emphasis on the current and future potential of a smartphone, the ability to virtualize smartphones with all their real-world features into a virtual platform, is a boon for those who want to rigorously experiment and customize the virtualized smartphone hardware without spending an extra penny. Once virtualizable independently on a larger scale, the idea of virtualized smartphones with all the virtualized pieces of hardware takes an interesting turn with the sensors being virtualized in a way that’s closer to the real-world behavior. When accessible remotely with the real-time responsiveness, the above mentioned real-world behavior will be a real dealmaker in many real-world systems, namely, the life-saving systems like the ones that instantaneously get alerts about harmful magnetic radiations in the deep mining areas, etc. And these life-saving systems would be installed on a large scale on the desktops or large servers as virtualized smartphones having the added support of virtualized sensors which remotely fetch the real hardware sensor readings from a real smartphone in real-time. Based on these readings the lives working in the affected areas can be alerted and thus saved by the people who are operating the at the desktops or large servers hosting the virtualized smartphones.