Network-Aware Application Adaptation for Mobile Hosts

Speaker: Benjamin Atkin

Abstract

Applications which communicate extensively over a network can be highly sensitive to network performance. This is especially true in a wireless network, where mobile hosts must cope with large variations in available bandwidth. Explicitly adapting to network conditions can help mask this variability. For instance, a client-server application can defer inessential work and otherwise reduce communication when the quality of connection to the server is poor. In this talk I will describe an approach to application adaptation which differs from the usual mode-based technique. I will also discuss two implementations of modeless adaptation which I have worked on: ATP, a library for bandwidth-aware communication, and MFS, a cache manager for a distributed file system.