A NEW APPROACH TO HANDLE MOBILITY IN CORBA USING TUNNELING

Abstract

The recent developments in the computing world have laid stress on mobility thus introducing more flexibility in ones routine. Mobile device users are increasing in number. The existence of mobile devices in a distributed environment introduces many new issues i.e. handoff, disconnection that need to be handled while developing a distributed application. In recent years, noticeable growth in the computer industry has been the number of distributed applications being built using Object Request Broker (ORB). These ORBs are implementation of Object Management Group's (OMG) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). CORBA defines a framework for developing object-oriented distributed application. The OMG has specified a protocol to allow ORBs to interwork, called the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP). Current CORBA technology, including the GIOP and HOP protocols, is not designed for use in a mobile environment. Using CORBA in a mobile environment raises a number of problems due to terminal mobility and characteristic of wireless network. This dissertation identifies and discusses the problems due to terminal mobility in CORBA and describes the design and implementation of a framework for wireless environment, to handle mobility in CORBA. Our framework allows CORBA clients running on mobile devices to communicate transparently with CORBA objects hosted by the fixed hosts. We established an infrastructure-based wireless network and compared the performance of our approach with existing approaches on this network. The results of comparison show that the approach developed by us performs better than existing approaches.