Mobile computing (like the peer to peer transaction model did) brings about a new paradigm of distributed computing in which communication may be achieved through wireless networks and users can compute even as they relocate from one support environment to another. The impact of mobile computing on systems design goes beyond the networking level and directly effects data management.  Although being a relatively new area, mobile data management has attracted a lot of research efforts, motivated by both a great market  potential and by many challenging research problems.

Along with Evi Pitoura of the University of Ioannina  we have initiated a research collaboration to study the effect of mobility in transaction processing and data management. After surveying the related literature it was apparent that mobility, as the peer property for the peer-to-peer model, affects the transactional, computational and data model, the communication paradigm, transaction management, commit processing, software architecture and program support. At the file and database level it might effect predictive caching, weak consistency, dynamic replica placement, fault-tolerance and checkpointing as well as other related functions.

In reviewing the scatter literature on mobile computing we felt that our review and conclusions on this new and upcoming area could benefit other researchers as well. To this end we have contacted the  Kluwer Academic Publishers, proposed and written a research book on data management for mobile computing. This book belongs to the series of "Advances in Database Systems" and aims to provide a thorough and cohesive overview of these recent advances. It fills the gaps found in the related literature, it will provide a number of case studies, it summarizes open problems and suggest promising research topics. 

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Internet technology (e.g., web) in conjunction with today’s mobile devices (e.g., laptops, notebooks, personal digital assistants) and the emerging wireless technologies (e.g., digital cellular, packet radio, CDPD) offer the potential for unprecedented access to data and applications by mobile workers. Yet, the limited bandwidth, high latency, high cost, and poor reliability of todays wireless wide-area networks greatly inhibits supporting such applications over wireless networks.  A desirable objective of the ideal wireless computational model is the ability to efficiently support existing client/server based applications without any changes to the client or server code in addition to supporting other new type of applications. To support this objective while dealing with the problem of disconnection and to improve response time a new way of structuring  the involved computational processes is needed. In "Client/Intercept: a Computational Model for Wireless Environments" along with Andreas Pitsillides we presented the Client/Intercept computational model that makes it possible to efficiently run distributed applications in wide area wireless networks. It compares this model with the client/server model and the emerging client/agent/server communication paradigm.  One of the extensions of this work is to study the effect of this new paradigm on transaction processing and mobile commitment.

While other wireless systems, such as Rover and Bayou, use intercept characteristics, none to our knowledge base its formal implementation on the client/intercept model. WebExpress , an IBM offering, is so far the only true client/intercept system, for this see below.

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The explosive growth of the Internet has fuelled the creation of new and exciting information services. Most of the current technology has been designed for desktop and larger computers with medium to high bandwidth and generally reliable data networks. On the other hand, hand-held wireless devices provide a much more constrained and poor computing environment compared to desktop computers. That is why wireless users rarely (if ever) benefit from Internet information services. Yet the trend and interest for wireless services is growing with fast pace. Personalization comes into aid by directly toning down factors that break up the functionally of the Internet services when viewed through wireless devices; factors like the “click count”, user response time and the size of the wireless network traffic. In this paper we present a flexible personalization system tuned for the wireless Internet. The system utilizes the various characteristics of mobile agents to support flexibility, scalability, modularity and user mobility.

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