Document Type

Technical Report

Department

Computer Science and Engineering

Publication Date

1998-01-01

Filename

WUCS-98-02.PDF

Technical Report Number

WUCS-98-02

Abstract

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. This is usually accomplished in one of two ways: search or tracking. In search, an algorithm hunts the mobile unit through the network each time a message is to be delivered, while in tracking, a specific home keeps up to date information about the current location of the mobile unit. Our paper proposes two message delivery algorithms based on these two paradigms of mobility. In general, our approach is to adopt existing algorithms from distributed computing to solve the problem of message delivery in the mobile setting, allowing us to leverage off existing knowledge about these algorithms and extensive research from distributed computing. The transformation from distributed to mobile computing is accomplished by treating the mobile units as messages that roam across the fixed network structure. First we show how snapshot algorithms can be adapted to perform message delivery through search, and then how the model of diffusing computations can be altered to track a mobile unit.

Comments

Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K71834RZ

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