A new TWIST on mobile computing: Two-Way Interactive Session Transfer

The ubiquitous use of computer resources for daily productivity is a goal that presently remains unrealised. We believe that the convergence of desktop and mobile applications into a seamless computing experience will provide a strong motivation for future "anytime, anywhere computing". The authors describe this convergence as the capability to perform the handoff of application sessions across heterogeneous platforms using the network as a conduit. In addition to discussing the architecture and protocols to facilitate this capability, the authors also provide a taxonomy for describing a variety of different session handoff schemes. In particular, they have identified an important Two-Way Interactive Session Transfer (TWIST) behaviour for communication between heterogeneous clients and servers. To demonstrate the concepts, they have implemented the handoff capability with TWIST semantics into a real-world application that serves as a teaching tool for radiology clinicians. From experimental data, the authors show that the handoff mechanism incurs little delay to transfer larger data-laden sessions.