Mobility: Processes, Computers, and Agents

The future of computing ever-increasingly lies in ever-increasing mobility
in which computers continue their network operations while physically
changing their location, and code moves from system to system
performing its designated tasks throughout a network.

This book brings together in one single resource the leading edge of
research and practice in three areas of mobility: process migration,
mobile computing, and mobile agents. Presented chronologically, the
papers in this book--each written by leading experts in that particular
area--track the development of critical technologies that have influenced
mobility. Introductions by the editors and original afterwords by many of
the papers' authors provide information on implementation and practical
application, technological context, and updates on the most recent
advances.

The book highlights many common challenges and solutions inherent in
various aspects of mobility: infrastructure, scalability, security, standards,
robustness, naming and locating mobile entities, and more. Individual
papers describe specific research and development in each of the three
major areas, covering such topics as:

An analysis of process migration from the earliest work to contemporary commercial systems
Barriers to effective mobile connectivity, mobile IP, and ubiquitous computing
Descriptions of various mobile agent systems, such as Telescript, Aglets, Agent TCL, and the mobile agent system standard (MASIF)

This selection of influential papers illustrates the evolution of mobile
technology as well as the state of the art of one of the most significant
trends in computing.

Dejan Mil^jicic is a senior scientist at HP Labs, where he leads the kernel internals development of the multi-computer systems group. He has worked on process migration and subsequently on mobile agents in the past 10 years. He is the program chair of the Agent Systems and Applications Symposium (ASA'99), on the editorial board of IEEE Concurrency, and on the executive committee of the IEEE Task Force on Internetworking.

Frederick Douglis is the head of the Distributed Systems Research Department at AT&T Labs--Research. He has worked in the areas of process migration and mobile computing for over a decade. He is the chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on the Internet and the past chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Operating Systems and Application Environments, and he has chaired numerous conferences including the 1998 USENIX Technical Conference. He is on the editorial boards of World Wide Web and IEEE Internet Computing.

Richard Wheeler is a principal design engineer at EMC Corporation, where he leads an operating systems research group. His process migration experience includes taking part in the development of the MOSIX system, authoring several articles on migration, and co-authoring a book on MOSIX. He has been a senior member of the operating systems team at Thinking Machines Corporation and a Principal Research Engineer at The Open Group's Research Institute.

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