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L2imbo: A distributed systems platform for mobile computing

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Abstract

Mobile computing environments increasingly consist of a range of supporting technologies offering a diverse set of capabilities to applications and end-systems. Such environments are characterised by sudden and dramatic changes in the quality-of-service (QoS) available to applications and users. Recent work has shown that distributed systems platforms can assist applications to take advantage of these changes in QoS and, more specifically, facilitate applications to adapt to their environment. However, the current state-of-the-art in these platforms reflects their fixed network origins through their choice of synchronous connection-oriented communications paradigms. In this paper we argue that these paradigms are not well suited to operation in the emerging mobile environments. Furthermore, we offer an alternative programming paradigm based on tuple spaces which, we believe, offers a number of benefits within a mobile context. The paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a new platform based on this paradigm.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Distributed Multimedia Research Group, Department of Computing, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK

    Nigel Davies, Adrian Friday, Stephen P. Wade & Gordon S. Blair

Authors
  1. Nigel Davies
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  2. Adrian Friday
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  3. Stephen P. Wade
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  4. Gordon S. Blair
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Davies, N., Friday, A., Wade, S.P. et al. L2imbo: A distributed systems platform for mobile computing. Mobile Networks and Applications 3, 143–156 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019116530113

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