Replication—Support for Advanced Mobile Applications

Abstract

Applications in mobile computing have to live with massive fluctuations of connectivity, bandwidth, latency, and cost in the underlying communication system. These fluctuations must be masked in order to provide the end user with predictable expenses and functionality. This can be achieved in employing cheap high bandwidth connections to set up a long term usage capability in replicating objects. This capability is afterwards exploited when communication cost increases or its quality decreases. However, off the shelf replication systems that are unaware of the applications they support, often fail to produce sufficient results. In this paper we present an approach for object based replication-support systems for mobile computing which can be tailored to specific applications. Mter discussing the basic concepts, we present our current prototype system MISTRAL that opens this flexibility to C++-based applications.