Interactive Exchange of Structured Multimedia Data with Mobile Hosts

In this paper an architecture is presented which enables applications on mobile computers to transparently exchange multimedia objects with applications on stationary servers via the Object Bus. The components of our architecture face the common problems of mobile computing, like limited bandwidth, end systems with limited resources, and frequent disconnections. Therefore, they are designed to use the available resources efficiently and to minimise these problems. This is done, e.g. by using object specific methods of data reduction and level-of-detail, by adaption of transfer to given Quality-of-Service parameters, and by data compression. All these methods are influenced by contexts like local resources, available communication channels, and user preferences. Finally the abstract architecture is mapped to OMG CORBA. The architecture and a selection of the exchange strategies are used to build a prototype of a mobile information system.