Tracking mobile units for dependable message delivery

As computing components get smaller and people become accustomed to having computational power at their disposal at any time, mobile computing is developing as an important research area. One of the fundamental problems in mobility is maintaining connectivity through message passing as the user moves through the network. An approach to this is to have a single home node constantly track the current location of the mobile unit and forward messages to this location. One problem with this approach is that, during the update to the home agent after movement, messages are often dropped, especially in the case of frequent movement. In this paper, we present a new algorithm which uses a home agent, but maintains information regarding a subnet within which the mobile unit must be present. We also present a reliable message delivery algorithm which is superimposed on the region maintenance algorithm. Our strategy is based on ideas from diffusing computations as first proposed by Dijkstra and Scholten. Finally, we present a second algorithm which limits the size of the subnet by keeping only a path from the home node to the mobile unit.