A

MOBILE COMPUTING: CHALLENGES AND POTENTIAL

SEMINAR REPORT
Submitted to the faculty of Engineering
North Maharashtra University, Jalgaon.
In partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of

Bachelor of Engineering
In
Computer Engineering

Submitted By

NEMADE DIPAK
D.

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

S.S.V.P.S.s B.S. DEORE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, DHULE.
2003 - 2004
I

MOBILE COMPUTING CHALLENGES AND POTENTIAL

A
SEMINAR REPORT
Submitted to the faculty of Engineering
 North Maharashtra University, Jalgaon.
In partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of

Bachelor of Engineering
In
Computer Engineering

Submitted By

NEMADE DIPAK D.

Under the Guidance of

Mr. G. K. Patnaik.

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

S.S.V.P.S.s B.S. DEORE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, DHULE.
2003 - 2004
II

CERTIFICATE
 This is to certify that the seminar entitled MOBILE COMPUTING:
CHALLENGES AND POTENTIAL has been carried out by
NEMADE DIPAK DIGAMBAR under my guidance in partial
fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Bachelor of
Engineering in Computer Engineering of North Maharashtra
University, Jalgaon during the academic year 2003-04.

Guide & Head of the Department Principal

Mr. G. K. Patnaik Dr. S. V. Deodhar

III
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I take this opportunity to express deep sense of gratitude and sincere

thanks for the invaluable assistance that I have received, at the worthy hands
my Guide Mr. G. K. Patnaik
I express my sincere thanks to our H.O.D. Sir for permitting me to
present this seminar and also to ht e entire staff member who have helped
me directly or indirectly.
I also express thanks to my friends and well wisher for their
underlying support shown during the preparation of this seminar.
Finally I would like to express my sincere thanks to my gratitude
towards my family for always being there hen I needed them to most. The
credit of all success goes to them.

Dipak D . Nemade.

IV
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract 01
1. Introduction 02
2. Mobility, Portability & Utility 04
2.1 Display Devices
2.2 Integrated Circuit
2.3 Hard Drive And other Storage
2.4 Input Devices
3. Mobile Networking 06
4. Fundamental Challenges 09
4.1 Constraint of Mobility
4.2 Need of Adaptation
4.3 Taxonomy of Adaptation
4.4 Extended Client-server Module 13
5. Coda & Odysseys Result
5.1 Disconnected Operation
5.2 Optimistic Replication
5.3 Support for Weak Connectivity
5.4 Isolation Only Transaction
5.5 Server Replication
6. Fertile Topics For Exploration 15
6.1 Caching Metrics
6.1.1 Some Open Questions
6.2 Algorithm for Resource Revocation
6.2.1 Some Open Questions
6.3 Analysis of Adaptation
6.3.1 Some Open Questions
6.4 Global Estimation From Local Observation
6.4.1 Some Open Questions
7. Conclusion 20
Bibliography 22
Appendix

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 ABSTRACT

This paper is an answer to the question: "What is unique and

conceptually different about mobile computing?" The paper begins by
describing a set of constraints intrinsic to mobile computing, and examining
the impact of these constraints on the design of distributed systems. Next, it
summarizes the key results of the Coda and Odyssey systems. Finally, it
describes the research opportunities in five important topics relevant to
mobile computing: caching metrics, semantic callbacks and validators,
resource revocation, analysis of adaptation, and global estimation from
local observation.

1
Chapter 1.
 Introduction
As we know the field of mobile computing is as broad as
traditional computer. The costumer wants from technology expecting the
same convenience and computing power in mobile device as same as
computer on desk. For the people lending to think and work in the places
other than desks, mobile computing allows them to use computer where ever
they needed not where it is tied by wire and most popular example of this is
Laptop.
The mobile computing is simply defined as a computing device which
can communicate through a wireless channel. The explosion in mobile
computing has been made possible through the continued advancement of
certain key technological areas. It is possible to evaluate the past successes,
current trends and future opportunities by considering the following areas.
First we need to consider the relationship between mobility, portability,
human ergonomics and cost, e.g. in order to make a device portable it must
be small and lightweight which preclude the hard drive and keyboard design.
The second thing that is a fundamental requirement of todays computer
network connectivity. This mostly implies the radio-frequency wireless
communication for mobile devices. And the third and most important are the
power consideration of mobile computer. Mobility implies reliance on
mobile portable power source in the form of battery. The parts of the mobile
devices are power-efficient because the power available from a battery is
closely related to its size and weight. As expected that the power of battery
is not increased more than 30% in future[3], power efficiency is the
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fundamental technology.
 Also we are must be aware of What is really about mobile
computing? The computer are smaller and bit travel by wireless rather
Ethernet. How can this possibly make any difference? Isnt a mobile system
merely a special case of a distributed system? Are there any new and deep
issues to be investigated, or is mobile computing just the latest fad?
All answer of above questions are there in the report which is in three
parts: a characteristics of the essence of mobile computing; a brief summary
of result obtained in the context of the Coda and Odyssey system; and a
guided tour of fertile research topics awaiting investigation.

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 Chapter 2.
MOBILITY, PORTABILITY, UTILITY

Mobile computing has benefited greatly from the advances in many

areas of the technology. The example of this is high density VLSI
fabrication technique, heat dissipation, and increased hard drives densities
on the desktop which have also driven the feasibility of mobile computing.
The following are some of the areas which are to be device design in
future[1]:

Display device: For the people who are interacted with mobile devices
require some sort of display device for feedback. The desktop version in a
screen provides the same resolution, refreshment rate and color capabilities
which are also provided in laptop in display, is less than inch thick. The
color crystal is the most popular for this use but requires about 50% of the
power of the entire mobile.

Integrated circuits: Now a days, the most important part of the mobile
computer the CPU, is about the size of thumbnail. Even with this high level
of integration advances are still achieved in areas such as wireless
transmitters where items such as inductor are especially difficult to fabricate
on a silicon die. As the function of the clock frequency is performed the
power required by the chip is increased, which is the big issue

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Hard drive and other storage: As with integrated circuit, the density of
the hard drive increases dramatically throughout the years. When the disk
platter is not in use then, stop the rotation of it, is the typical method to
reduce the power consumed by hard drives. For the low amount of power
and physical space the solid-state storage devices such as a flash memory is
also popular as mass storage devices.

Input devices: For the sake of mobility, to reduce the size of the input
devices is one of the major goals in the field of input devices. The input
and output facilities of mobile computers still need to maintain a size large
enough so that they are convenient to operate. One method of bypassing this
constraint is to obtain by combining the input and output facilities into a
touch screen such as the Apple Newton and AT&Ts EO.

The challenges are complex, interrelated and exacerbated by often hard,

physical limitation such as radio-frequency bandwidth. However, if we try to
gauge the innovative potential of the computer industry by its past
performance, if appears that we have only begun to see the future of mobile
computing.

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 Chapter 3.
Mobile Network

It is easy to see that computer are not used in isolation any longer,
and communication has become a stringent of computing today from the
emergence of network-oriented languages such as Java to the legislatively-
encouraged of communication technologies. Mobile computing is no
excepting to despite the additional challenges of utilizing the radio-
frequency bandwidth. When the radio-frequency are transmitted, they are
reflected, refracted and scattered by many object on their way to the
receiver. The received signal is a combination of all of these paths, such that
the phase and amplitude of the received signal can change drastically from
even slight movements of the mobile or the surrounding objects.
There are a variety of methods used to combat these effects including special
error-correcting and error-detecting codes are added to each packet,
spreading the packets bits across multiple packets or frequencies, and
enhanced modulation schemes.

There are three methods to connect a wireless computer to the rest of

the world with assumed that the wired base station is infrastructure. The
satellite communication may be possible but it is extremely power intensive.
The first method is to use modem over a voice grade cellular phone. It is
similar to that of connecting to the Internet from home through Internet
Service Provider (ISP) over a standard voice-grade line. In second method
Mobitex and ARIDS are two examples of dedicated packet data networks
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which are emerging to meet the demand of higher efficiency and data rates
than analog modems over radio can provide. The third, hybrid of these two
approaches uses the cellular networks designed for voice transmitting packet
data. CDPD is a system which uses ideal voice channels on the analog
AMPS voice cellular system to transmit its data.
Communication between mobile nodes as an intermediary is also possible
and it is called as Ad-hoc networking. This method, requires some or all
the mobile nodes acts as packet router, and the network protocols be robust
enough to handle request, random topology changes as the nodes move[5].

In traditional desktop computing, the topology of the network is static.

The physical location of the machine is encoded into its network address in
protocols such as TCP/IP. In the mobile network, the topology can be
constantly changing as the devices move from cell to cell. The questions of
how to change routing policies, update node addressing, and maintain
mobile device location information are actively researched areas. An
example of a protocol which does this while attempting to maintain
compatibility with the existing Internet protocols is Mobile IP[7].

The severely limited bandwidth is another fundamental challenge that

mobile communications must consider. The part of the radio frequency
spectrum usable for communications is limited and must be shared with
television, radio, military, satellite communications and many other services.
Therefore, the frequency band available for mobile computer
communication is extremely small when compared to that of a wire
connected to a desktop computer. The challenge to mobile computing is to
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maintain high data rates in the presence of high errors while still maintaining
fair access to a multitude of subscribers.

It is important that the wireless communication link not drastically

deplete the mobile computer of its power. Two areas are actively addressed:
reducing the power used by the transceiver circuitry when it is on, or simply
turning the transceiver off when it is not expected to be use. The latter
method affects the mobile network in other ways, such as adding to the
amount of delay experienced by a packet that is to be transmitted from the
base station. In the presence of a potentially very high node density and non-
uniform traffic, the protocols allow a variable trade-off between the
frequency of on time (and therefore consumed energy) and the amount of
time before a packet can be transmitted from the base station. The protocol
in [4] supports energy-conservation in mobile network where the base
station periodically transmits large amount of broadcast data such as news or
stock quotas. These protocol intelligently organizes the data with a directory
so the mobile can reduce the amount of time its receiver is on while
watching the broadcast for the data of interest.

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 Chapter 4.
Fundamental Challenges

4.1 Constraints of Mobility:

Mobile computing is characterized by four constraints:
* Mobile element are resource-poor relative to static element.
For a given cost and level of technology, considerations of weight,
power, size and ergonomics will exact a penalty in computational resources
such as processor speed, memory size, and disk capacity. While mobile
elements will improve in absolute ability, they will always be resource-poor
relative to static elements.
* Mobile is inherently hazardous.
.
A Wall Street stockbroker is more likely to be mugged on the streets
of Manhattan and have his laptop stolen than to have his workstation in a
locked office be physically subverted. In addition to security concerns,
portable computers are more vulnerable to loss or damage.
* Mobile connectivity is highly variable in performance and reliability.
Some buildings may offer reliable, high-bandwidth wireless
connectivity while others may only offer low-bandwidth connectivity.
Outdoors, a mobile client may have to rely on a low-bandwidth wireless
network with gaps in coverage.

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* Mobile element rely on a finite energy source.
While battery technology will undoubtedly improve over time, the need
to be sensitive to power consumption will not diminish. Concern for power
consumption must span many levels of hardware and software to be fully
effective.
These constraints are not artifacts of current technology, but are
intrinsic to mobility. Together, they complicate the design of mobile
information systems and require us to rethink traditional approaches to
information access.
4.2 Need of Adaptation:
Mobility exacerbates the tension between autonomy and
interdependence that is characteristic of all distributed systems. The relative
resource poverty of mobile elements as well as their lower trust and
robustness argues for reliance on static servers. But the need to cope with
unreliable and low-performance networks, as well as the views and
conclusions contained here are those of the authors and should or need to be
sensitive to power consumption argues for self reliance.
Any viable approach to mobile computing must strike a balance
between these competing concerns. This balance cannot be a static one; as
the circumstances of a mobile client change, it must react and dynamically
reassign the responsibilities of client and server. In other words, mobile
clients must be adaptive.
4.3 Taxonomy of Adaptation strategies:
The range of strategies for adaptation is delimited by two extremes as
shown in fig (1). At one extreme, adaptation is entirely the responsibility
10
individual applications. While this laissez-faire approach avoids the need for
system support, it lacks a central arbitrator to resolve incompatible resource
demands of different applications and to enforce limits on resource usage. It
also makes applications more difficult to write, and fails to amortize the
development cost of support for adaptation.

The other extreme of application-transparent adaptation places entire

responsibility for adaptation on the system. This approach is attractive
because it is backward compatible with existing applications: they continue
work when mobile without any modifications. The system provides the focal
point for resource arbitration and control. The drawback of this approach is
that there may be situations where the adaptation performed by the system is
inadequate or even counterproductive. A spectrum of possibilities lies
between these extremes points that we called as application-aware
adaptation.

4.4 The Extended client sever model:

This is the another way to examine the impact of mobile computing
constraints on the client-sever model. In this model the small no. of trusted
server sites constitute the true home of data. Technique such as caching and
read-ahead can be used as good performance, while end to end
authentication and encrypted transmission can be used to preserve security.
In effect, the client-server model decomposes a large distributed system into
a small nucleus that changes relatively slowly, and a larger and less static
periphery of client. From the perspectives of security and system
administration, the scale of the system appears to be that of the nucleus. But
from the perspectives of performance and availability, a user at the periphery
receives almost standalone service.

Coping with the constraints of mobility requires us to rethink this

model. The distinction between clients and servers may have to be
temporarily blurred, resulting in the extended client-server model shown in
Figure 2. the resource limitation client may require certain operation
normally performed on clients to something be performed on research-rich
server. These are, of course, short-term deviations from the classic client-
server model for purposes of performance and availability. From the longer-
term perspective of system administration and security, the roles of servers
and clients remain unchanged.
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 Chapter 5.
Summary of Coda and Odyssey Results

We are exploring application-transparent adaptation since about 1990.

Our research vehicle has been the Coda file system, a descendant of AFS[2].
Coda has been in active use for five years, and has proved to be a valuable
testbed. The clients of coda are in the regular use over a wide range of
network such as 10 Mb/s Ethernet, 2 Mb/s radio, and 9600 baud modems.
Since the research of Coda have already been extensively documented
in the literature we only provide a high-level summary of the key result
here :

Disconnected operation: Coda has demonstrated that disconnected

operation is feasible, effective, and usable in a distributed Unix system. The
key mechanisms supporting disconnected operation include hoarding (user-
assisted cache management), update logging with extensive optimizations
while disconnected, and reintegration upon reconnection.
Optimistic replication: Coda was one of the earliest systems to
demonstrate that an optimistic replica control strategy can be used for
serious and practical mobile computing . It incorporates several novel
mechanisms to render this approach viable. These include log-based
directory resolution , application-specific file resolution , and mechanisms
for conflict detection, containment and manual repair.
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Support for weak connectivity: Coda has shown that weak connectivity
can be exploited to alleviate the limitations of disconnected operation. The
mechanisms needed to accomplish this include adaptive transport protocols,
a rapid cache validation mechanism, a trickle reintegration mechanism for
propagating updates, and model-based cache miss handling for usability.

Isolation-only transactions: In the context of Coda, a new abstraction

called isolation-only transaction has been developed to cope with the
detection and handling of read-write conflicts during disconnected operation
[9]. This abstraction selectively incorporates concepts from database
transactions, while making minimal demands of resource-poor mobile
clients and preserving upward compatibility with Unix applications.

Server replication: . Coda has shown how server replication can be used
to complement disconnected operation . Although this is not particularly
relevant to mobility, it is an important result in distributed systems because it
clarifies the relationship between first-class (i.e. server) replicas and second-
class replicas (i.e., caches). It also represents one of the first demonstrations
of optimistic replication applied to a distributed system with the client-server
model.
. More recently, we have begun exploration of application aware
adaptation in Odyssey, a platform for mobile computing. An preliminary
prototype of Odyssey has been built and a more complete prototype is under
development. The early evidence is promising, but it is too early for
definitive results.
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 Chapter 6.
Fertile Topic For Exploration

In choosing the five topics discussed below, I have followed two

guidelines. First, these problems are more likely to be solved by rigor and
analysis than by
implementation and experience. Second, each of these problems is real, not
contrived. Good solutions insights to these problems will strongly impact the
mobile computing systems of the future.
Each topic is presented in two parts: a brief discussion that lays out the
problem space of the topic, followed by a sample of open questions
pertaining to it. Again, my aim posing these questions is not to be exhaustive
but to offer food for thought.
6.1. Caching Metrics
Caching plays a key role in mobile computing because of its ability to
alleviate the performance and availability limitations of weakly-connected
and disconnected operation. But evaluating alternative caching strategies for
mobile computing is problematic.
Today, the only metric of cache quality is the miss ratio. The underlying
assumption of this metric is that all cache misses are equivalent (that is, all
cache roughly the same penalty from the user). This assumption is valid
when the cache and primary copies are strongly connected, because the
performance penalty resulting from a cache miss is small and, to a first
approximation, independent of file length. But the assumption is unlikely to
be valid during disconnected or weakly-connected operation. The miss ratio
15
also fails to take into account the timing of misses. For example, a user may
react differently to a cache miss occurring within the first few minutes of
disconnection than to one occurring near the end of disconnection.
To be useful, new caching metrics must satisfy two important criteria.
First, they should be consistent with qualitative perceptions of performance
and availability experienced by users in mobile computing. Second, they
should be cheap and easy to monitor. The challenge is to develop such
metrics and demonstrate their applicability to mobile computing. Initial
work toward this end is being done by Ebling [1].

6.1.1. Some Open Questions

What is an appropriate set of caching metrics for mobile computing?
Under what circumstances does one use each metric?
How does one efficiently monitor these metrics?
What are the implications of these alternative metrics for caching
algorithms?

6.2 Algorithms for Resource Revocation

Application-aware adaptation complicates the problem of resource
management. In principle, the system owns all resources. At any time, it may
revoke resources that it has temporarily delegated to an applicaton. Alas,
reality is never that simple. A variety of factors complicate the problem.
First, some applications are more important than others. Any acceptable
revocation strategy must be sensitive to these differences. Second, the cost
of revoking the same resource may be different to different applications. For
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example, reducing the bandwidth available to one application may result in
its substantially increasing the amount of processing it does to compensate.
A similar reduction in bandwidth for another application may result in a
much smaller increase in processing. A good revocation strategy must take
into account these differential impacts. Third, there may be dependencies
betweenprocesses that should be taken into account during revocation. For
example, two processes may have a producer-consumer relationship.
Revoking resources from one process may cause the other to stall. More
complex dependencies involving multiple processes are also possible.
Unless revocation takes these dependencies into account, hazards such as
deadlocks may occur.
Revocation of resources from applications is not common in current
systems. Classical operating systems research has focused on resource
allocation issues rather than resource revocation. As a result there is
currently little codified knowledge about safe and efficient techniques for
revocation. This deficiency will have to be remedied as application-aware
adaptation becomes more widely used.
6.2.1. Some open questions
How does one formulate the resource revocation problem?
How does one characterize the differential impact of revocation on
different applications?
What strategies does one use if multiple resources must be
simultaneously evoked?
How does one distinguish between resources whose revocation is easy to
recover from and those it is expensive or impossible to recover from?
How does one handle deadlocks during revocation?
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6.3. Analysis of Adaptation
How does one can compare the adaptive capabilities of two mobile
clients? The primary future of merit is agility, or the ability of a client to
promptly respond to perturbation. A system that is highly agile may suffer
from instability. Such a system consumes almost all its resources reacting to
minor perturbations, hence performing little useful computation. The ideal
mobile client is obviously one that is highly agile but very stable with
respect to all variables of interest. Control theory is a domain that might
have useful insights to offer in refining these ideas and quantifying them.
Historically, control theory has focused on hardware systems. But there is no
conceptual reason why it cannot be extended to software systems. Only
careful investigation can tell, of course, whether the relevance is direct and
useful or merely superficial.
6.3.1. Some open questions
What are the right metrics of agility?
Are there systematic techniques to improve the agility of a system?
How does one decide when a mobile system is "agile enough"?
What are the right metrics of system stability?
Can one develop design guidelines to ensure stability?
Can one analytically derive the agility and stability properties of an
adaptive system without building it first?

6.4. Global Estimation from Local Observations

Adaptation requires a mobile client to sense changes in its environment,
18
make inferences about the cause of changes, and then react appropriately.
These imply the ability to make global estimates based on local
observations.
To detect changes, the client must rely on local observations. For example,
it can measure quantities such as local signal strength, packet rate, average
round-trip revocation on different applications? times, and dispersion in
round-trip times. But interpreting these observations is nontrivial. A change
in a given quantity can be due to a multiplicity of non-local phenomena. For
example, packet rate will drop due to an overload on a distant server. But it
will also drop when there is congestion on an intermediate network segment.
If an incorrect cause is inferred from an observation, the adaptation
performed by the client may be ineffective or
counterproductive.
At present there is no systematic theory to guide global estimation from
local observations. The problem is especially challenging in the absence of
out-of-band communication, because the client cannot use an alternative
channel to help narrow the diagnosis on the main communication channel
6.4.1. Some Open Questions
Are there systematic ways to do global estimation . from local estimates?
Can one bound the error in global estimates?
What is the relationship of global estimation to agility of adaptation? Can
one quantify this relationship?
Can one quantify the benefits of out-of-band channels? For example, how
much does the presence of a low-latency, low-bandwidth channel help with
estimates on a parallel high-latency, high- bandwidth channel?
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 Chapter 7.
Conclusion

The tension between autonomy and independent is intrinsic to all

distributed systems. Mobility exacerbates this tension. For mobile clients to
tolerate a far broader range of external conditions than has been necessary
hitherto.
Adaptation is the key to mobility. By using local resources to reduce
communication and to cope with uncertainty, adaptation insulates users from
the vagaries of mobile environments. Our research is exploring two different
approaches to adaptation: application-transparent and application-aware. Our
experience with Coda confirms that application-transparent adaptation is
indeed viable and effective for a broad range of important applications. In
circumstances where it is inadequate, our initial experience with Odyssey
suggests that application-aware adaptation is the appropriate strategy.
Mobility will influence the evolution of distributed systems in ways
that we can only dimly perceive at the present time. In this sense, mobile
computing is truly a seminal influence on the design of distributed systems.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

[1] Imrich Chlamtac, Jason Redi, Mobile Computing: Challenges and

Potential University of Texas at Dallas,Richardson,TX,U.S.A.,1998.

[2] M. Satyanarayanan Fundamental Challenges in Mobile Computing,

School of Computer Science, Carriegie Mellon University, 19196.

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