Network-aware mobile programs
Mudumbai Ranganathan, Anurag Acharya, Shamik D. Sharma, Joel Saltz · University Libraries (University of Maryland) · 1997
In this paper, we investigate network-aware mobile programs, programs that can use mobility as a tool to adapt to variations in network characteristics. We present infrastructural support for mobility and network monitoring and show how adaptalk, a Java-based mobile Internet chat application, can take advantage of this support to dynamically place the chat server so as to minimize response time. Our conclusion was that on-line network monitoring and adaptive placement of shared data-structures can significantly improve performance of distributed applications on the Internet. 1 Introduction Mobile programs can move an active thread of control from one site to another during execution. This flexibility has many potential advantages. 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. Similarly, an Internet video-conferenc...