Mobile computing-a promising future that still requires much work

Mobile computing is a paradigm shift in computing and telecommunications caused by the people´s lifestyles. This area is still in its infancy as there are many unresolved research issues. The research issues include design of system specifications and protocols for mobile system; a plethora of issues in providing transparent virtual networking of computers, database and information management issues, security and compression techniques and resource discovery and design of agents. A typical mobile computer system consists of the following components: a static communication backbone using wired means; a set of static hosts; sets of mobile hosts (MHs) that can communicate with a predetermined static host; and mobile subnets/wireless cells. The static communication backbone connects all the static hosts sometimes called mobile support stations (MSSs). As the name suggests, the static communication backbone and the static hosts are not mobile. Each MSS can communicate with a set of mobile hosts. The mobile hosts can move within a limited geographical area referred to as a wireless cell or a mobile subnet