Discuss the applicability to mobile and ubiquitous systems of techniques drawn from the areas of

Question

(a) peer-to-peer systems

(b) coordination and agreement protocols

(c) replication

Answer 1

This is mainly a question for class discussion but some key observations are:

(a) peer-to-peer systems are volatile but they are not necessarily physically integrated, e.g. devices involved might be conventional PCs and typically there is no need to apply the boundary principle. Some of the p2p algorithms assume there is a connected infrastructure.

(b) the coordination and agreement protocols are in general designed on the assumption that failure is the exception (e.g. election algorithms) whereas in volatile systems it is the rule. Many of these techniques are too
expensive in communication or too slow to converge to be run frequently. Notions such as consensus are too strong to implement and have to be replaced by more pragmatic, weaker abstractions such as soft state. However, multicast provides a good level of indirection as long as relatively cheap-to-implement semantics suffice.
(c) Deals with disconnected operation. However, in general the techniques considered in this chapter tend to assume a redundancy of resources whereas in ubiquitous and mobile systems the opposite is generally true.