m-Roam: a service invocation and roaming framework for pervasive computing

This paper proposes an architectural framework for integrating services within an enterprise and accessing them from mobile devices in a pervasive-computing environment. Present network environments are prone to failures from disconnections and device crashes. Being able to maintain service transaction while moving to different locations and wireless networks (known as service roaming), is currently a major objective in pervasive and mobile computing research. This paper presents a framework (called m-Roam) that allows for mobile clients to perform service invocation and roaming. The framework addresses this problem by introducing a proxy-based architecture so that invocation context and transaction state can be maintained or updated accordingly, while the user roams in different locations.