A mobile code toolkit for adaptive mobile applications

Cellular and wireless communication, portable computers, and satellite services promise mobile users to have access to information anywhere and anytime. However, mobile computing is characterized by many constraints: small, slow, battery-powered portable devices, variable and Together, they complicate the design of mobile information systems and require rethinking traditional approaches to information access and application design. The relative resource shortage of portable devices as well as their lower trust and robustness argue for reliance on static servers. The need to cope with unreliable and low-performance networks, as well as the need to be sensitive to power consumption argues for self-reliance. Any feasible approach to mobile computing must strike a balance between these competing issues. This balance cannot be static as the environment of mobile computing changes; it must react, or in other words, the applications must be adaptive. We propose an approach for adaptive mobile applications based on mobile code. To demonstrate our ideas, Mle are developing a mobile code toolkit and implemented a resource-intense application, an MP3 player. The application's objects will be split dynamically between the portable device and proxy, sewers according to the portable device and proxy server resources and wireless network state. The results show that both increased application performance and reductions in power consumption are possible under certain conditions by shipping the resource-intensive decoding phase to the less resource-constrained access network.