Building Information Systems For Mobile Environments

Abstract

It is expected that in the near future, tens of millions of users will have access to distributed information systems through wireless connections. The technical characteristics of the wireless medium and the resulting mobility of both data resources and data consumers raise new challenging questions regarding the development of information systems appropriate for mobile environments. In this paper, we report on the development of such a system. First, we describe the general architecture of the information system and the main considerations of our design. Then, based on these considerations, we present our system support for maintaining the consistency of replicated data and for providing transaction schemas that account for the frequent but predictable disconnections, the mobility, and the vulnerability of the wireless environment.