Remote Storage for Mobile Devices

The ability to access remote file storage from mobile devices enables a number of new use cases for storing and sharing data. We describe the design and implementation of a Remote Storage Client framework on Symbian OS, the leading smart phone OS on the market. Our work is inspired and informed by previous work like Coda [1]. We describe why Coda cannot be used directly in our target scenarios and environments. We then describe how we adapted the Coda concepts to suit our needs. The advanced features supported by the framework include disconnected operation with whole-file caching and immediate file access (adapting whole-file caching principle to multimediacentric smart phones). Using this framework, we have implemented Symbian OS remote filesystems based on WebDAV and FTP.