Abstract

There is a strong trend toward the production of small "notebook" computers. The small size of portable computers places inherent limits on their storage capacity, making remote paging desirable or necessary. Further, mobile computers can "walk away from" their servers, increasing load on network routing resources and/or breaking network connections altogether. Therefore, it is desirable to allow client-server matchups to be made dynamically and to vary over time, so that a client might always be connected to nearby servers. Accordingly, we have built a self-organizing paging service that adapts to changes in locale and that stores pages in remote memory if possible. We show empirically that there is no performance penalty for using our paging facility instead of a local disk. This suggests that portable computers need neither a hard disk nor an excessive amount of RAM, provided that they will operate in environments in which remote storage is plentiful. These are important facts becau...

Citations