A Managed Architecture for Mobile Distributed Applications

Internet-distributed systems are beginning to offer a serious platform for stable, long-lived, flexible applications development. Moreover, such Internet-scale applications are motivating new modes of work and company integration such as teleworking and virtual enterprises. There is an increasing realisation that within such flexible working structures that applications will have to support some form of mobility, both to handle explicitly mobile nodes (such as users with lap-tops) and to provide reconfiguration and redeployment of application components around the Internet. A major challenge for such mobile distributed applications is to provide stability in the face of constant change, providing application developers and users alike with a stable architecture whose elements and locations may change across time. This paper presents an architecture that separates location and mobility knowledge from algorithmic structure within an application, thus facilitating a managed solution to adaptability and mobility.