Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 20:27:18 GMT
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Daniel J. Duchamp
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Mobile Computing Laboratory
I work in the fields of ``mobile computing'' and ``operating systems.''
The general challenge is how best to build systems of small, wireless,
mobile computers. Current efforts focus on building ``reconfigurable
distributed services.'' The reconfigurable distributed services that
we have built so far are re-implementations of standard services
(e.g., file service, X11 window service, IP) employing new algorithms
internally that facilitate the following:
- operation in spite of disconnection and/or intermittent connection
- efficient use of limited bandwidth (wireless links current operate
only at kilobit-to-megabit speeds)
- dynamic service location
- dynamic load balancing (to improve latency and throughput)
I will continue to work on mobile computing during the next few years,
focusing on these new projects:
- making applications aware of, and able to react to, changes in their
location
- techniques for automatically and dynamically re-partitioning the
function of a program into a client portion (running on a mobile
computer) and a server portion (running on a stationary
``infrastructure'' machine)
- exploitation of low power, solid state non-volatile storage
technologies, such as flash EEPROM -- these devices are especially
well suited to portable computers
- a new architecture for distributed systems supporting mobility in
which an intermediary is interposed between client and server; the
purpose of the intermediary is to intelligently filter all but the
most essential data traveling from the infrastructure out to the
mobile host
Sabah S. al-Binali
Fri Sep 22 16:39:42 EDT 1995