Mobile access to the Internet: a mediator-based solution

Nomadicity is a new challenge for computing and communication technologies. Modern cellular telephone systems extend the usability of portable persona l computers enormously. A nomadic user can be given ubiquitous access to re mote information stores and computing services. However, the behaviour of w ireless links creates severe inconveniences within the traditional data com munication paradigm. In this paper we give an overview of the problems rela ted to wireless mobility We also present a new software architecture for ma stering the problems and discuss a new paradigm for designing mobile distri buted applications. The key idea in the architecture is to place a mediator , a distributed intelligent agent, between the mobile node and the wireline network.