This article summarizes the results of the BARWAN project, which focus
ed on enabling truly useful mobile networking across an extremely wide
variety of real-world networks and mobile devices. We present the ove
rall architecture, summarize key results, and discuss four broad lesso
ns learned along the way. The architecture enables seamless roaming in
a single logical overlay network composed of many heterogeneous (most
ly wireless) physical networks, and provides significantly better TCP
performance for these networks. It also provides complex scalable and
highly available services to enable powerful capabilities across a ver
y wide range of mobile devices, and mechanisms for automated discovery
and configuration of localized services. Four broad themes arose from
the project: 1) the power of dynamic adaptation as a generic solution
to heterogeneity, 2) the importance of cross-layer information, such
as the exploitation of TCP semantics in the link layer, 3) the use of
agents in the infrastructure to enable new abilities and to hide new p
roblems from legacy servers and protocol stacks, and 4) the importance
of soft state for such agents for simplicity, ease of fault recovery,
and scalability.