Members

Françoise André, Frédéric Le Mouël

Motivations

Mobile computing is a domain which is rapidly growing. It benefits from technological breakthroughs of mobile terminals (wearable computers, mobile phone, PDA, smart card, etc), wireless networks and protocols (WLAN, GSM, satellite, etc) and applications which take profit of the environment (ubiquitous computing). For the moment, mobile terminals are still a minority compared to static stations but we think that this will not be true in the near future. The use of mobile terminals brings up new problems which are not addressed in traditional systems. First, due to weigh limitations, resources on mobile terminals are poor in comparison with static stations : battery life, screen display, bandwidth, CPU power, etc are limited. Second, mobile terminals are subject to important variations inherent to their own characteristics (battery, etc) or to the environment (discovering or loss of terminals, devices, services, etc). To solve these problems has led us to consider the distribution of services and applications in this versatile environment.

Objective

Existing approaches in mobile computing and ubiquitous computing allow mobile terminals to use external resources by collecting or storing informations or performing computation by means of proxies or mobile agents. We aim at generalizing this use of external resources by using distribution techniques. We intend to integrate into the distribution criteria and policies : (i) the terminals characteristics such as the battery life, bandwidth, etc and (ii) an important reactivity and adaptation to environment changes. This distribution will be transparent at execution time and will be built as a MolèNE service in a middleware layer which ensures a high degree of portability.

Publications