Abstract

Application mobility is the ability for an application to travel with its user, moving between computers or moving with a computer between locations. We describe new techniques that enable unmodified applications to move independently of each other without requiring changes to infrastructure or actions by administrators. The techniques are based on three new abstractions that overcome the obstacles to application mobility unresolved by previous work in process migration and mobile computing. First, we introduce reliable network connections, an abstraction that automatically detects network connection failures caused by movement, and that recovers from these failures transparently. We introduce an enhancement detection protocol that enables the use of this abstraction in environments where not all applications support it. This protocol is a general-purpose solution to the problem of safely detecting, at user-level, the presence of remote support for any type of network communication enhancement. Second, we introduce the abstraction of a window session, a transportable representation of the state of a graphical user interface, that allows the user interface of a running application to be moved, either with or independently of the application process, from one display to

Citations