Mobility: Processes, Computers, And Agents

The future of computing ever-increasingly lies in ever-increasing mobility in which computers continue their network operations while physically changing their location, and code moves from system to system performing its designated tasks throughout a network.

This book brings together in one single resource the leading edge of research and practice in three areas of mobility: process migration, mobile computing, and mobile agents. Presented chronologically, the papers in this book--each written by leading experts in that particular area--track the development of critical technologies that have influenced mobility. Introductions by the editors and original afterwords by many of the papers' authors provide information on implementation and practical application, technological context, and updates on the most recent advances.

The book highlights many common challenges and solutions inherent in various aspects of mobility: infrastructure, scalability, security, standards, robustness, naming and locating mobile entities, and more. Individual papers describe specific research and development in each of the three major areas, covering such topics as:

• An analysis of process migration from the earliest work to contemporary commercial systems
• Barriers to effective mobile connectivity, mobile IP, and ubiquitous computing
• Descriptions of various mobile agent systems, such as Telescript, Aglets, Agent TCL, and the mobile agent system standard (MASIF)

This selection of influential papers illustrates the evolution of mobile technology as well as the state of the art of one of the most significant trends in computing.
0201379287B04062001

Mobility is one of the foremost issues in networking today. This useful reference brings together in one convenient volume, the most important papers on the development and research in mobile computing. Starting with early systems where migrating processes first confronted the networking environment, the book progresses to more recent applications such as mobile agents for the Web, security and system reliability, and Mobile IP. The papers address three central technologies enabling mobile functionality within computer systems: process migration, mobile agents, and mobile computing. For each of these areas, the authors preface the papers with a description of what problems the technology addresses, and how the technology is actually used. By highlighting common challenges and solutions, this resource provides useful perspective on the past, present, and future of mobility in distributed computing.