Object management for network-centric systems with mobile objects

Abstract

Mobile software objects are computational entities that travel in large-scale and widely-distributed heterogeneous systems, and whose functionality can be attached to diverse computing environments. When employed over decentralized sites with operational and administrative autonomy, support for mobility raises difficult issues with respect to object management services. In particular it impacts persistence, reference handling, object naming, and requires extensive support for security. This paper discusses the requirements from an object management system that incorporates mobile, autonomous and reflective objects and presents the design and implementation of the Mobile Object Manager (MOM) which fulfills these requirements.