Optimising Transparency, Performance and Reliability in the Mobility Subsystem of a Mobile Object Framework

This thesis describes a number of advances made in order to produce a mobile object framework that is better suited for use in ad hoc networks than its predecessors. The focus of this thesis is on improving the performance, transparency and reliability of the mobility subsystem, which is responsible for the migration of objects from one device to another. Based on a comprehensive review of the literature, a new mobility subsystem has been proposed and implemented. The resulting runtime environment and proxy structure provides increased performance, and by managing erroneous situations within the proxies and supporting architecture, the reliability and transparency have been increased to both developers and end users. A series of empirical tests are executed against the new mobility subsystem, demonstrating the advantages of its reference management strategies and its fitness for use in ad hoc networks of heterogeneous devices.