Infrastructure for Distributed Applications in Ad Hoc Networks of Small Mobile Wireless Devices

Mobile wireless computing devices such as cellphones, pagers, personal digital assistants, pocket PCs, and tablet computers are all potential platforms for participating in small group, wireless, many-to-many distributed applications. The networking technology needed to support such applications is readily available. However, almost all existing middleware infrastructure for distributed applications was designed for central servers and wired connections. The Anhinga Infrastructure described here runs entirely on the wireless mobile devices and so does not require any central server support. The Anhinga Infrastructure provides a message broadcast ad hoc networking protocol and a distributed computing platform based on lightweight versions of Java, Jini Network Technology, and tuple spaces.