Architectural Support for Managing Nomadic Applications and Services

In the increasingly wireless world of data communications; laptops, palmtops and other nomadic computers are appearing that have built-in, wireless access (e.g. cellular, radio, infrared, satellite access) to one or more wireless networks around them. Applications executing on these nomadic computers need to be able to locate services and enter into one or more service-level agreements with service providers. In addition, both application and network service providers need to be able manage the services they provide in order to ensure that the management policies concerned with service provision are enforced. In this paper, we present a flexible software architecture to support the development and management of nomadic applications and services The architecture is based on the use of an architecture description language (Darwin) and a interaction model for defining, binding and managing services (Midas).