On-Demand Delivery of Software in Mobile Environments

In this paper we describe ACHILLES, a system for ondemand delivery of software from stationary servers to mobile clients over wireless network links. ACHILLES supports disconnected operations and employs mechanisms for hiding latency of slow networks. It's main features are a cache replacement policy that uses a simple cost model to determine which software components should be removed from the cache, and a mechanism called resource qualification for checking if resources of a mobile computer are sufficient for the successful execution of applications that are to be loaded. An initial implementation has been evaluated and results showing trade-offs for cache replacement policies are presented.