Combining Location and Data Management in an Environment for Total Mobility

Computer technology today only provides modest support for mobile users: small and lightweight `Personal Digital Assistants' are available but are limited to proprietary user interfaces; in particular they lack adequate input facilities. Notebook computers feature standard keyboards but these limit miniaturisation and therefore mobility. Both PDAs and notebook computers suffer from current deficiency of mobile data communication networks which provide, at best, bandwidth of around 800 characters per second. A mobile user should not be limited by the facilities of a particular terminal he or she chooses to carry. Instead, users should be given the flexibility to access their applications and data from any terminal available to them, at any place, at any time. In this paper, we introduce TM, an architecture for Total Mobility, which supports both the mobility of terminals and users. TM consists of two major components: • a location data management model which provides a database for retrieving, manipulating, and representing mobility of users and terminals. Location data is voluminous and multidimensional in nature. The database provides the system with up-to-date information about the location of users and terminals. Moreover, it needs to handle data capture during the run time of the query. • a data management system which provides each user with data at the current location based on a disconnected file system architecture specially developed for mobile computing applications. This allows efficient operation even when low-bandwidth connections have to be used.