Mobile Object Location Discovery in Unpredictable Environments

Emerging mobile and ubiquitous computing environments present hard challenges to software engineering. The use of mobile code has been suggested as a natural fit for simplifying software development for these environments. Existing strategies for locating mobile code assume an underlying fixed, stable network. An alternative approach is required for mobile environments, where network size and reliability cannot be guaranteed. This paper introduces AMOS, a mobile code platform augmented with a structured overlay network. We demonstrate how the location discovery strategy of AMOS has better reliability and scalability properties than existing approaches, with minimal communication overhead. Finally, we show how AMOS can provide autonomous distribution of effort fairly throughout a network using probabilistic methods that requires no global knowledge of host capabilities.