Impact of host mobility on distributed computations

B. R. Badrinath , Rutgers University

Traditional distributed systems have assumed static hosts. The advent of portable computers allows users to connect to a network from different locations. This implies that distributed systems will have to account for host mobility; host mobility has impact on network algorithms, distributed data management, caching, and resource reservation algorithms. Host mobility imposes a cost on network routing, cost on maintaining a logical structure, cost on guaranteeing network performance. In this talk, we will explore some principles and solutions proposed to handle the integration of mobile hosts into distributed systems.