An architecture in Java for mobile computation

Abstract

The components required to effectively use a mobile computing infrastructure include the mobile computing languages (MCLs), the programming paradigms for mobile computation and the architectures within which to implement user tools and applications. There are few architectures that exist presently in which users can implement their own tools and applications using a programming paradigm of their choice. In this paper, an architecture built using Java in which users can create their own tools and applications is presented. The key feature of this architecture is that it is general enough to allow users to implement their own tools and applications without being restricted as to which programming paradigm is used. Two tools were developed to illustrate the general-purpose nature of the architecture. The first is a simple network information tool which supplies information about a node in the network when queried. The second tool performs a distributed branch-and-bound search of a tree structure. This second tool gives a glimpse of the possibility of implementing distributed high performance computing solutions on this architecture.