System support for mobile distributed applications

With the widespread use of distributed systems on one hand and the rapid deployment of mobile computing and communication infrastructure on the other, it becomes important to link both technologies together. This paper first outlines new problems arising from distributed mobile computing and then presents a software support architecture and system for mobile applications. We then discuss a system model for structuring mobile applications, a station software infrastructure for managing resource access in dynamic mobile environments, and a description technique for specifying behavioural aspects of mobile applications. The implementation is based on the remote procedure call of the OSF Distributed Computing Environment and on Microsoft RPC. First experiences with our prototype are reported and directions for future development are outlined