Distributed Object Technique for Mobile Computing
(M.R. Lyu)

The emergence of the global Internet and personal communications services (PCS) has established the foundations for ubiquitously accessible and highly available distributed computing systems to support applications such as remote access and control, virtual mobile offices, and wide-area collaborative systems. These applications must be usable even in the presence of breaks in the network, or network partitions, which may be caused by, for instance, a broken wireless connection from a mobile computer to the fixed network infrastructure.

Achieving high availability in such a mobile distributed system entails the provision of fault tolerance, ubiquitous access, and high-concurrency resource sharing. The distributed object paradigm has proved to be indispensable in the design of distributed systems due to its inherent ability to hid heterogeneity between various platforms. In this project, we will explore distributed object technologies, particularly CORBA and DCOM, for designing and experimenting mobile computing systems. We define a general physical architecture consisting of mobile hosts, mobile support stations, and fixed hosts interconnected by a fixed wide area network. Mobile hosts communicate with the mobile supporting systems on the fixed network through either a wireless or temporary wired link. The objects encapsulate any software entity, which can be represented as a logical grouping of data and methods (files, application components, dynamic libraries, Java applets, etc.). We will investigate how the objects are managed in such a wireless architecture, and how mobile agents can be designed and executed for various applications.