Distributed Resource Monitors for Mobile Objects

We present our position on resource monitoring as three working hypotheses. First, a resource-aware placement of components of a distributed application can provide significant performance gains over a resource-oblivious placement. Second, effective mobility decisions can be based on coarse-grained monitoring. Finally, a simple and cheap distributed resource monitoring scheme can provide sufficient information for effective mobility decisions. We present a design for distributed resource monitors which we believe can provide effective resource information at an acceptable cost. 1. Introduction Mobile programs can move an active thread of control from one site to another during execution. This flexibility has many potential advantages in a distributed environment. For example, a program that searches distributed data repositories can improve its performance by migrating to the repositories and performing the search on-site instead of fetching all the data to its current location. Simil..