The Impact of Mobility on Distributed Systems Platforms

Mobile computing environments are characterised by change: heterogeneous end-systems have to operate over underlying communications whose quality of service (QoS) and associated cost may be subject to rapid and massive fluctuations. Such changes present new challenges for all distributed system services and in particular for distributed systems platforms. This paper explores the impact of mobility on distributed systems and distributed systems platforms highlighting shortcomings in both the models and implementations of current platforms. In particular, the lack of platform support for adaptive applications and services is explored and recommendations are made for future distributed systems. Keywords Mobile computing, distributed systems platforms, QoS, adaptive applications. 1 INTRODUCTION The starting point for this paper is the belief that knowledge is power. More specifically, powerful applications require knowledge of their underlying communications and processor infrastructure ..