Motivation
Designing applications that perform well in a mobile environment difficult and different from “traditional” distributed application design:
- Wireless communication is substantially different from wired communication:
- frequent spurious disconnections (handoff, shadowed areas)
- lower bandwidth (GSM, CDPD: less than 20 kbps)
- high bandwidth variability (roaming outdoors vs. plugged into docking station)
- heterogeneous networks (outdoors: cellular, indoors: infrared LAN)
- security risks (everyone can listen in on wireless channel)