A New TWIST on Mobile Computing: Two-Way Interactive Session Transfer

The ubiquitous use of computer resources for daily productivity is a goal that presently remains unrealised. We believe that the convergence of desktop and mobile applications into a seamless computing experience will provide a strong motivation for future “anytime, anywhere computing.” In this paper we describe this convergence as the capability to perform the handoff of application sessions across heterogeneous platforms using the network as a conduit. In addition to discussing the architecture and protocols to facilitate this capability, in this paper we also provide a taxonomy for describing a variety of different session handoff schemes. In particular, we have identified an important Two-Way Interactive Session Transfer (TWIST) behaviour for communication between heterogeneous clients and servers. To demonstrate our concepts, we have implemented the handoff capability with TWIST semantics into a real-world application that serves as a teaching tool for radiology clinicians. From experimental data we will show that the handoff mechanism incurs little delay to transfer large data-