User Equipment (UE) Reservation Engine. The UE Reservation Engine takes care of the allocation of User Equipment resources to experimenters, providing them with full remote access to mobile UEs. It receives instructions from the Physical Device Manager over a REST API, in order to:
1. create users,
2. allocate a UE for a user, and
3. terminate all UE allocations of the user. Based on these instructions received from the Physical Device Manager, the UE Reservation Engine communicates with the TeamViewer [6] UE application through its own REST API to create a user within the SoftFIRE corporate TeamViewer account, and respectively share and unshare UEs with it. A UE that is shared with a user can be accessed remotely through the online TeamViewer console of that user. Once connected to a UE, the user can control it as if he/she physically accessing the UE, and therefore can install and control applications on the UE.
2.3.6.1.1. Message Flows for Procedures of UE Reservation Engine The three procedures, i.e. user creation, UE allocation, and termination of UE allocations, are performed via message exchanges between the Experiment Manager and the UE Reservation Engine. Figure 7 below illustrates these message flows. The Engine implements a REST API to create users, reserve a UE, and terminate all reservations. As can be seen in the figure, the Physical Resource Manager acts as a message router, relaying messages between the Reservation Engine and the Experiment Manager. At the background in a UE, the TeamViewer app receives its supported API calls from the UE Reservation Engine. This transparent operation between the User and TeamViewer provides the User with remote control of the app, and hence the UE itself.
