Looking for a common view for mobile worlds

Abstract

This paper considers central issues of distributed computing in a mobile environment. Its aim is to light on the first brick of a common view for mobile systems. We pool together mobile systems and analyze them from different angles including architecture and computability aspects. We show that mobile systems (i.e., cellular systems, ad hoc networks, peer-to-peer systems, virtual reality systems or cooperative robotics) are basically confronted with the same problems, hence it is useless to maintain the actual "misleading" barriers. Due to important similarities between the different mobile systems we claim that the next logical step in building a common view is to design a model which conceptually should unify them by providing an abstract description of the parameters which distinguish these systems from classic distributed systems. Moreover, in the new model, the fundamental problems of distributed computing (i.e., (k-)mutual exclusion, leader election or group communication) should find appropriate specifications.