Data Dissemination in Wireless Computing Environments

In our increasingly mobile world the ability to access information on demand at any time and place can satisfy people's information needs as well as confer on them a competitive advantage. The emergence of battery-operated, low-cost and portable computers such as palmtops and PDAs, coupled with the availability and exploitation of wireless networks, have made possible the potential for ubiquitous computing. Through the wireless networks, portable equipments will become an integrated part of existing distributed computing environments, and mobile users can have access to data stored at information servers located at the static portion of the network even while they are on the move. Traditionally, information is retrieved following a request-response model. However, this model is no longer adequate in a wireless computing environment. First, the wireless channel is unreliable and the bandwidth is low compared to the wired counterpart. Second, the environment is essentially asymmetric with a large number of mobile users accessing a small number of servers.