Design and implementation of distributed file access for mobile devices

• Main Author: Li, Jing
• Format: Others
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/1861/1/MQ72936.pdf; Li, Jing <http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/view/creators/Li=3AJing=3A=3A.html> (2002) Design and implementation of distributed file access for mobile devices. Other thesis, Concordia University.

The objective of this project is to explore a proposal to provide seamless file transferring between mobile device and remote servers, while the mobile device is moving among local stations based on IP network. At first, three proposals are presented. One of the best proposals (the third one) is selected for implementation. The implementation is done by taking advantage of several prevailing software techniques: J2ME, RMI and Java Servlet. J2ME is a platform to simulate the mobile devices (PDA). RMI is a Java package to construct a distributed system, which is an interpreter among the mobile device, local stations and remote server. The protocol used in the communication between mobile device and local station is HTTP, which is supported by Java Servlet. There are two challenges in the implementation of the proposal. The first one is how to choose the techniques to connect mobile devices and the fixed IP stations and server. J2ME and RMI work perfectly with each other, in the simulation of the mobile connectivity among a distributed system. The second challenge is how to design the system in order to guarantee the file transferring seamlessly. Making three separate classes, MobileAgent, Placeholder and Requestholder, successfully solves this problem. By using the above three java based techniques, the result of the implementation of the proposal shows a good performance in simulating mobile file transfer between mobile devices and file servers.