Reworking the RPC paradigm for mobile clients

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a popular paradigmfor designing distributed applications. The existing RPC implementations, however, do not allow special treatment of mobile hosts and wireless links; which can be a cause of degraded performance and service disruptions in the presence of disconnections, moves and wireless errors. In addition, future information oriented and location aware mobile applications will also need the ability to dynamically bind mobile clients to local information servers. Current RPC implementations do not support dynamic binding of mobile clients to servers. In this paper we explore an alternate approach for implementing remote procedure calls that is based on a client-agent-server orindirect model. We describe an RPC implementation based on this approach, called M-RPC, which provides a clean way for mobile wireless clients to access existing RPC services on the wired network via their Mobility Support Routers (MSRs). M-RPC adds to the RPC layer on the mobile clients such useful features as dynamic binding, support for disconnected operation and call retries from the MSR.