Data Management in Pervasive Computing: Past, Present and Future

2:00pm Friday May 5, 2000
Lecture Hall III, Administration Building

The evolution of the Internet into the Global Information Infrastructure, and the concommitant increase in the available computational and information resources, is impacting various facets of life. Wireless networks and handheld "walkstations" will be an important component of the GII. They will engender a continous interaction between humans and networked resources, and provide a ubiquity of access that is unlikely to be matched by wired networks. However, wirelessly networked mobile systems suffer from several well known deficiencies compared to their wired counterparts. These include resource constraints on the mobile platforms (battery, CPU, disk, memory etc.) as well as the low bandwidth and disconnection prone nature of wireless networks. In this talk, I will describe how these present new challenges in the area of "data management", broadly defined. I'll talk about the initial work in this area such as mobile web access via transcoding proxies. I will trace their evolution into present day systems using our own Mowser system as an example. I will then talk about new issues in data management that have arisen as a consequence of both bluetooth type ad-hoc systems as well as planned broadband wireless systems. I will discuss the details of some of these issues in the context of our ongoing work in "Project DNA". This effort seeks to enable ad-hoc cooperation between autonomous, dynamic and adaptive components which are located in "vicinity" of one another. A major application area of our effort is mobile e-commerce