Rover Mobile Application Toolkit

The Rover toolkit combines relocatable dynamic objects and queued remote procedure calls to provide unique services for "roving" mobile applications. A relocatable dynamic object is an object with a well-defined interface that can be dynamically loaded into a client computer from a server computer (or vice versa) to reduce client-server communication requirements. Queued remote procedure call is a communication system that permits applications to continue to make non-blocking remote procedure call requests even when a host is disconnected, with requests and responses being exchanged upon network reconnection. The challenges of mobile environments include intermittent connectivity, limited bandwidth, and channel-use optimization. Experimental results from a Rover-based mail reader, calendar program, and two non-blocking versions of World-Wide Web browsers show that Rover's services are a good match to these challenges. The Rover toolkit also offers advantages for workstation applications by providing a uniform distributed object architecture for code shipping, object caching, and asynchronous object invocation.

Architecture:

Publications:

Contacts:

For more information on Rover and related projects see the Laboratory for Computer Science home pages of the Parallel and Distributed Operating System group, and the Programming Systems Research Group.

Preliminary Rover project documentation .

Private Rover project information (LCS only).

Last updated by $Author: maxp $ on $Date: 2000/05/03 16:41:59 $.
Copyright © 1995-1998 Anthony D. Joseph and Massachusetts Institute of Technology