1MCK: Wireless Communication with Mobile Agents.

In mobile computing, a computer which in 1970 filled several large rooms, has been reduced in size so that it is now slips neatly into your pocket or is bound to your wrist. It has taken the last decade for this feat of engineering to come to fruition. Meanwhile, we have also experienced many evolutions and revolutions in the software systems and communication fields. The most dramatic of these is the unprecedented rise of the Internet and large Intranets. Key to this revolution is the great need which people have for ubiquitous and instant communication. Hence, a fundamental question which Computer Science is asking itself is: “How do we support complex communication-based applications on our now sophisticated, yet limited, mobile computing devices?” Initial answers to this question range from the infrastructure-level (e.g. GSM which offers ~1Kbps maximum bandwidth [3]), to the system level (e.g. PPP and TCP/IP), up to the application level (e.g. Lotus cc:Mail and Lotus Notes). In order to tackle part of this question we concentrated on the mismatch between conventional communication protocols (e.g. TCP/IP) and the hostile characteristics of cellular wireless communication networks (e.g. GSM). To this end we have developed the Mobile Communication Kernel (MCK). The cellular wireless environment is deemed hostile as it suffers from device mobility, frequent an