The p - kernel : A framework for mobile and wireless network protocol implementation on personal digital assistants - Steven Robinson

This paper describes a software called p-kernel providing a configurable architecture for experimenting implementations of mobile and wireless network protocols on personal digital assistants. A network software is aiming at managing the network adapters of a computer, making the resources of the computer available to other network nodes, and providing the data and control abstractions for passing information from process to process over the network. Most network software are structured into layers. Each layer contains a certain number of protocols. A network software is normally a part of the kernel of an OS (e.g. the Linux kernel [Satc 00]) but not always and may be embedded within a user level application (e.g. x-kernel [Hutc 91]). A number of protocols for supporting mobile and wireless communications has emerged such as Bluetooth [Haar 00], Mobile IP (MIP) [Perk 96], Service Location Protocol (SLP) [Gutt 99], and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) [Wire 98]. They are, however, not always widely deployed and available on laptops, handheld devices, and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) [Vars 00]. The problem addressed in this paper is the support of mobile and wireless network protocols in PDAs. Palm OS is the operating system of a widely spread PDA architecture [Palm 00]. There is a need for an environment for doing research on mobile and wireless network protocols on the Palm OS, i.e. experimentation of new protocols at the physical, link, and network layers. The Net Library available for the Palm OS does only support a fixed set of protocols and does not allow integration of