Mobile Computing

The rapid development of wireless digital communication technology has created capabilities that software systems are only beginning to exploit. The falling cost of both communication and mobile computing devices (laptop computers, hand-held computers, etc.) is making wireless computing affordable to both business users and private consumers. Mobile computing is not a "scaled-down" version of the established and well-studied field of distributed computing. The nature of wireless communication media and the mobility of computers combine to create fundamentally new problems in networking, operating systems, and information systems. Furthermore, many of the applications envisioned for mobile computing place novel demands on software systems. Although mobile computing is still in its infancy, some basic concepts have been identified and several seminal experimental systems developed. This work contains chapters that describe these concepts and systems, and describes applications that are currently being deployed and tested.