Evaluation of Middleware for Distributed Objects on Handheld Devices

Use of object-oriented middleware will ease the development of distributed applications in pervasive and mobile computing environments. However, the handheld devices have limited resources and the wireless networks have limited capacity. In this paper, we evaluate if PDAs and laptops are powerful enough to run commodity CORBA implementations. We have performed and analysed thorough measurements of different configurations of hardware, network and software. We found that vanilla PDAs run CORBA implementations quite efficiently. Therefore, use of object-oriented middleware is feasible in wireless networking, using PDAs and handheld devices today. However, tailoring the CORBA implementations for limited resources yields better performance. This indicates the need for specialised implementations for handheld devices, or configurable and tailorable ORBs with regard to the environments the implementations are deployed.