Designing mobile computing systems using distributed objects

This article examines the application of distributed objects to the construction of highly available distributed systems for mobile, ubiquitous computing. High availability for the end user entails the provision of ubiquitous access and flexible resource-sharing. The defining characteristics of mobile computing, such as the frequent movement of users and hosts, the scarcity of network and local computing resources available to the mobile host, and the possibility of disconnections, present difficult challenges in providing high availability for clients in a distributed object system. Meeting these challenges requires dynamic object management techniques in the distributed server architecture on the fixed wired network, as well as object replica management techniques to achieve connection transparency and disconnected operation in the mobile client architecture. Various issues and solutions in constructing a dynamic distributed object-oriented architecture capable of supporting mobile computing are presented.