The Esperanto Broker: a communication platform for nomadic computing systems
There is an increasing demand for middleware for nomadic computing applications. Owing to the inherent characteristics of such environments, these platforms have to address two fundamental issues: (i) device disconnections and the limitations of wireless networks may force users to experience short periods of service unavailability; and (ii) the complexity to design and develop next-generation mobile computing applications. This paper proposes the Esperanto Broker (EB), a communication platform that addresses mobility issues via an integrated approach, i.e. at data-link, network, and middleware levels. Decoupling interactions are achieved via a tuple-space underlying infrastructure. To support developers with advanced services, the EB enhances the distributed objects computing model providing the abstraction for the communication paradigms standardized by the W3C. Esperanto applications can be modeled as sets of objects that are distributed over mobile devices, which communicate via remote method invocations (RMIs). RMIs natively implement pull and push models, in both one-to-one and one-to-many multiplicity. The paper focuses on the EB design issues, essential aspects of the implementation, and performance evaluations of the implemented prototype. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
nomadic computing distributed object computing model communication paradigms mobility management