Services to support distributed applications in a mobile environment

A key characteristic of mobile computing is that the end systems involved can experience differing degrees of connectivity during typical operational cycles. The paper discusses the issues associated with developing distributed system services to operate in such an environment. We focus on the provision of file system support and argue that existing file systems, including those developed for use in a mobile environment, contain assumptions about their underlying communications infrastructures which are unlikely to hold in a mobile environment. This argument is supported by an in-depth examination of a specific file system issue: the support of shared libraries. A new service to support shared libraries in mobile environments is proposed and we discuss the integration of this service into a wider architecture of reactive services being developed to support distributed mobile computing