Supporting Adaptive Services in a Heterogeneous Mobile Environment

Nigel Davies, Gordon S. Blair, Keith Cheverst and Adrian Friday.

One-line summary: A worthless paper describing a "prototype" network-adaptive wireless application based on network-quality-aware RPC, except that the application is not network adaptive, it is not wireless, and the RPC is not network aware and is buggy besides.

Overview/Main Points

Heavyweight RDO system (similar to Rover's) encapsulates mobile objects
Invocations on objects are done by RPC ("ANSAware"), which is supposed to be network-aware, but is not, so it has TCP-over-wireless problems (premature timeouts, mistaking losses for congestion, etc.)
To fix this, network-aware RPC called QEX ("quality-of-service-driven execution") is "under development". Many blue-sky statements about it but no concrete research direction stated.
Prototype app is audioconferencing+WB. Current implementation runs on PC's with Ethernet -- what a breakthrough. It will be "ported" to QEX in the future.

Relevance

None; basically they have used RDO's to write an application and stated that in the future, they will develop a QOS-driven RPC and port the application to use it instead of the buggy RPC they now have.

Flaws

Too numerous to mention.

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