Hydepark - Hyper Distributed Environment for Personal Appliances

The constantly ongoing trend of decreasing mobile computers in size while increasing their capabilites at the same time has led to a situation where devices such as laptops no longer stand back compared to average desktop computer systems. Even PDAs these days have characteristics that would have sufficed a high end workstation not too long ago. Still, there are certain aspects where special support for mobile application contexts is necessary due to contradictionary optimisation criteria:

• mobile systems have to be small while at the same time allow for a convenient user interaction;

• mobile systems have to provide maximum uptime while still retaining minimum weight;

• mobile systems have to allow for universal appliaction contexts while still providing special support for certain contexts.

Generally, two approaches are possible with this situation. One may try to design mobile systems for universal applicability and fulfill as many optimisation criteria as possible. With this approach, systems tend to grow in their capabilities as well as in size and unwieldiness.

Alternatively, one can go for specialisation and optimise systems for one clearly defined application context. The spectrum of possible contexts will consequently fall into partitions each of which one will be able to assign certain devices to. It is then an important requirement to provide a support environment in which specialised mobile systems can be supported and integrated into existing application contexts, based on their particular capabilities.

The »Hyper Distributed Environment for Personal Appliances« (Hydepark) aims at providing such a generic integration platform. Special care is being taken of supporting special capabilites each device can offer. Following a three class classification scheme, incremental support is given from coordination and mediation of optimum service instances for more powerful, open mobile systems (e.g. laptops) over an application binary loading infrastructure for less powerful sysmtes (such as today's PDAs) up to a full proxy system to provide simple devices (e.g. WAP phones) with access to distributed application infrastructures.

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