A Virtual Distributed System Architecture for Supporting Global-distributed Mobile Computing

This paper describes a Mobile-distributed System Architecture for supporting wireless data accessing. The concept of a Mobile-Floating Agent (or Mobility Agent) with it's notions of service/resource mobility and service pre-assignment is proposed. This Agent utilizes a mobility prediction algorithm to enable a mobile computer to be aware of its current location and potential locations (available links). When the mobile computer moves, it predicts the links and data services offered at the new location, prefetches and caches its critical data with hierarchical caching strategies. As the computer is moving to the new location, it dynamically adapts to the changing computing environments and makes data accessible with virtually the same efficiency as at the previous location (subject to link capacity).-4