Enabling the rapid development of dependable applications in the mobile environment
Amy Lynn Murphy, Gruia-Catalin Roman · 2000
Recent technological trends in the miniaturization of computing devices and the availability of inexpensive wireless communication have led to an expansion of effort in mobile computing. In this environment, interactions are transient, computations become highly decoupled and rely on weak forms of data consistency, disconnections are frequent and unpredictable, and component behavior is sensitive to changes in location, context, quality of service, or administrative domain. The goal of this thesis is to develop an environment that will facilitate rapid development of dependable mobile applications executing in both physical and logical mobile environments. Our focus is the development of abstractions that simplify the programming task. We present two design strategies to achieve this goal, the first of which focuses on algorithm development to support abstractions for inherently difficult problems in mobility while the second describes a technique to develop high level coordination constructs to support transient interactions among components.