P2 — a Generic Proxy Platform for Wireless Access and Mobility in CORBA
Michael Knapp, Rainer Ruggaber, Jochen Seitz
To appear at Nineteenth Annual
ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on PRINCIPLES OF DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING (PODC
2000), Portland, Oregon, 16-19 July 2000
Abstract
Distributed applications in a wireless environment often suffer from sudden
connection losses. Furthermore, scarce bandwidth and high error rates may
affect data transmission so that traditional Internet protocols like TCP
show unwanted behaviour. However, one of today’s most popular middleware
architectures, namely the Common Object Request Broker Architecture CORBA,
is built on top of TCP. Hence, its extension into the wireless and mobile
environment has to be carefully designed. This paper introduces P2, a proxy
platform for CORBA-based applications in the mobile environment that copes
with the mentioned problems. It can be transparently integrated into existing
distributed systems without changes to clients or servers using a generic
interface and dynamic type determination. Furthermore, this platform flexibly
provides services for context- and location-aware applications, thus broadening
the scope of the CORBA-based middleware.