Mobile File Access Using a Persona Carrier

The need to have a mobile user’s computing persona or environment move along with him or her must be satisfied if mobile computing is to become attractive to the general user. One way to do this without depending on a universal network infrastructure is to have the user carry his or her persona on a persona carrier, a device that stays with its owner at all times. Based on this idea, we have proposed a design that allows a user to access the distributed file system he or she normally uses even at isolated computers. We have built a prototype implementation that uses Coda as the distributed file system, and we find that it performs as well as a connected Coda client.