The heterogeneous world: Towards platform independent adaptive session mobility

As a result of the continued growth of both personal and mobile computing, users often interact with several computers on a daily basis and there is increasing diversity across the various platforms associated both mobile and stationary computing devices. For each device encountered, a unique session is created and as users interact with more and more devices, management and collaboration between these sessions become increasingly difficult. The ability to seamlessly transfer ongoing sessions across various devices within a network can alleviate this complexity to some degree. By supporting one common session across all devices, we can shield users from the resulting complexity of device and platform heterogeneity. The authors' approach involves an amalgamation of the thin-client and ubiquitous computing models, which they propose, will be a suitable method of supporting session mobility in mobile environments. This approach does not tie a user to single operating system or device, but instead delivers a rich assorted environment consisting of a range of applications specific to various platforms. Moreover, session transfer is supported in a flexible and adaptive manner to accommodate session hand-off across various hardware and platforms.