Effective wireless communication through application partitioning

The comparatively severe network constraints imposed by mobile wireless computing require more careful management of communication resources than is typically necessary in the wired network. The performance characteristics of the wireless network are affected by a number of factors such as changes in location, environmental noise, cost constraints, and contention with other users. In addition, since even simple applications can quickly consume all the bandwidth on a slow link the contention introduced between applications will be significant. These dynamic changes in limited resources increase the difficulty of effective network management for a mobile device. This paper describes an approach in which the application specifies its interactions with the mobile device through a high-level application programming interface (API). This interface allows application functionality to be partitioned between mobile and stationary machines, increasing the autonomy of the mobile device through local operations. This in turn decreases user-perceived latency and wireless bandwidth requirements, while providing a framework to support disconnected operation. By exposing application-specific information to the system about data priority and access patterns the effectiveness of system-applied network optimizations is increased.