On Mobile Access to Networked Resources
Anupam Joshi
(joshi@cs.umbc.edu)
Department of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Abstract
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 our
ongoing research to create (agent based) intelligent, adaptive
middleware that is "mobile aware", so that the underlying problems
mentioned earlier become transparent to the user (and
applications). Specifically, I will describe our ongoing efforts to
create proxy agents to enable "mobile access to multimedia
information". These agents combine media transcoding, Cooperative
Information Retrieval/Filtering, Web mining, Networked software
components, and disconnection management together to enable operation
under a weakly connected scenario.