Mobile access to the Internet: a mediator‐based solution

Nomadicity is a new challenge for computing and communication technologies. Modern cellular telephone systems extend the usability of portable personal computers enormously. A nomadic user can be given ubiquitous access to remote information stores and computing services. However, the behaviour of wireless links creates severe inconveniences within the traditional data communication paradigm. In this paper we give an overview of the problems related to wireless mobility. We also present a new software architecture for mastering the problems and discuss a new paradigm for designing mobile distributed applications. The key idea in the architecture is to place a mediator, a distributed intelligent agent, between the mobile node and the wireline network.