Mobile computing based on GSM: The Mowgli approach

摘要

Modern cellular telephone systems extend the usability of portable personal computers enormously. A nomadic user can be given ubiquitous access to remote information stores and computing services. However, the behavior of wireless links creates severe inconveniences within the traditional data communication paradigm. In this paper we give an overview of the problems related to wireless mobility. We also present a new software architecture for mastering them and discuss a new paradigm for designing mobile distributed applications. The key idea in the architecture is to place a mediator, a distributed intellignet agent, between the mobile node and the wireline network. A prototype implementation of the architecture exists in an environment consisting of Linux and Windows platforms and the GSM cellular telephone network.