An Architecture for Tetherless Communication

In the emerging paradigm of tetherless computing, client applications running on small, inexpensive, and smart mobile devices maintain opportunistic wireless connectivity with back-end services running on centralized computers, enabling novel classes of applications. These applications require a communications infrastructure that is mobility-aware, disconnection-resilient and provides support for an opportunistic style of communication. It should even be able to function across network partitions that might arise when end-to-end communication is not possible. We outline, design, and evaluate the implementation of an architecture that provides this functionality. We show that it is possible for next-generation mobile devices to obtain up to 80-fold improvements over conventional mechanisms by exploiting opportunistic WiFi links, and that this benefit can be delivered as an overlay that is compatible with the current Internet.