Rover is a software toolkit that supports the construction of both mobile-transparent and mobile-aware applications. The objective of the mobile-transparent approach is to develop proxies for system services that hide the mobile characteristics of the environment from applications. Since applications can be run without alteration, the mobile-transparent approach is appealing. However, to excel, applications operating in the harsh conditions of a mobile environment must often be aware of and take an active part in mitigating those conditions. The Rover toolkit supports a set of programming and communication abstractions that enable the construction of both mobile-transparent and mobile-aware applications. Using the Rover abstractions, applications obtain increased availability, concurrency, resource allocation e ciency, fault tolerance, consistency, and adaptation. Experimental evaluation of a suite of mobile applications built with the toolkit demonstrates that such application-level control can be obtained with relatively little programming overhead and allows correct operation, increases interactive performance, and dramatically reduces network utilization under intermittently connected conditions.
In the Rover toolkit REF , the middleware supports the development of both mobile-transparent and mobile-aware applications.
Mobile Computing with the Rover Toolkit
IEEE Trans. Computers
Computer Science