A programming Methodology for Disconnected Operation

Abstract

: State-of-the-art mobile computing devices offer substantial storage capacity and computing power. The recent emergence of sophisticated wireless communication technology will transform these mobile computing devices into mobile communicators, creating a new genre of powerful hand-held computing devices that can take advantage of distributed systems technology and applications. However, either to conserve battery power, or to reduce cost these new communication devices will inherently need to disconnect from the network. If the disconnection occurs during the execution of a distributed computation, then the computation may need to suspend until reconnecting to the network This paper presents a programming methodology that enables the programmer to write applications capable of adapting to disconnected operation. Our approach is based on experience building a disconnected NFS filesystem (D-NFS) for portable computers. 1 Introduction This paper describes a programming methodology for ..