Handoff of application sessions across time and space

Personal computing on mobile platforms such as laptops and personal digital assistants, rather than in a traditional desktop environment, is becoming increasingly more common. We address the issue of application session transfer for uninterrupted data access across this diverse range of platforms. This work is part of the iMASH project, a multi-year, multi-discipline collaborative effort focused on enabling mobile client platforms and incorporating them into existing legacy networked systems for use by medical practitioners. We have developed a tiered architecture that includes a middleware server layer positioned between existing application servers and multiple clients to make session transfer transparent to the user. Any client application executing our middleware-aware remote code library can save and restore its session by interacting with a middleware server. As a proof of concept, we have implemented the transfer of bookmarks, history, Web cache, and user preferences with the Mozilla open source Web browser, from this effort we have established baseline performance metrics and have found that the overhead is within reasonable bounds of just a few seconds of latency