Wireless Multicast for Mobile Transparent Computing

Mobile transparent computing terminal, being a handheld mobile device powered by transparent computing system, is a natural fit for the client terminal of the transparent computing system. The terminal uses transparent network operating system (TNOS) as the core of its system, it loads TNOS image from the internet through wireless network. Due to the bandwidth limitation of wireless network, it spends about four minutes or more of the time with traditional unicast in the mobile transparent computing environment on loading TNOS from servers. In this paper, multicast is used in the mobile transparent computing. Mobile transparent computing generally use the wireless local area network (WLAN) or 3G network. After studying the characteristics of the wireless multicast, we propose an efficient multicast grouping mechanism in mobile transparent computing over WLAN. With our proposal, the user´s average system loading time (average waiting time) is reduced about one third by using the multicast grouping mechanism compared with using unicast. Besides, it effectively improve user´s experience on mobile transparent computing.