Nomad: Application Participation in a Global Location Service

The rapid growth of the world wide web has led to the wider appreciation of the potential for Internet-based global services and applications. Currently services are provided in an ad hoc fashion in fixed locations, which users locate and access manually. Mobility adds a new dimension to the location of such services in a global environment. Most systems supporting mobility rely on some form of home-based redirection which results in unacceptable residual dependencies. Nomad is a middleware platform for highly mobile applications. A significant contribution of the Nomad platform is a novel global object location service that involves the participation of both applications and global structures.