Reaching out to the Cell Phone with Jini Sean Landis Networks and Infrastructure Motorola Labs P.O. Box 8000 Park City, UT 84060 435-655-3668 Sean.Landis@motorola.com Venu Vasudevan Networks and Infrastructure Motorola Labs 1301 E. Algonquin Road Mail Stop IL02/2240 Schaumburg, IL 60196 847-576-3809 venuv@labs.mot.com Abstract Jini has made considerable inroads as an enterprise computing platform, but it hasn't fulfilled its promise as an ubiquitous computing platform for thin-clients. A roadblock has been that full participation in a Jini community requires devices to support a fully capable Java virtual machine, something that is a challenge for mobile devices (e.g., cellphones). The Jini Surrogate specification aims to provide a service gateway that enables limited Java devices to hook into a Jini network, eliminating the need for Jini on the device. This paper describes the Jini Surrogate Architecture, its benefits in enabling wireless access to Jini services, and the implementation and performance issues uncovered in implementing surrogate-based services. The paper discusses several application architectures that can leverage the surrogate approach. These include exporting enterprise services from the wired internet to the wireless internet, and enabling a thin-client mobile agents platform that implements migratory services. These application architectures are being further explored as part of the Arches project. 1. Introduction Mobile users currently have access to much fewer services than are available to their wire-connected counterparts. Yet, mobility and remoteness are significant social trends for the foreseeable future. ResearchPortal.com estimates the number of mobile users to grow in the next few years to 20% of the US population. The effort to create a wireless uber-device that would combine the capabilities of a PC and a cell phone would bridge the gap between wired and wireless existence, has turned out to be very challenging[12]. Until significant innovation in microdisplays[1] and voice- activated services[2] bridges the gap in other ways, software architectures have to contend with how to bridge the gap between thin-client and a large, rich population of information and services. The focus of this paper is on supporting effective access to services rather than information. Although the two place some common demands on the software architecture, services tend to involve more complex interactions between the user and the system. An analogy would be to compare the interaction with one’s e-mail tool with the process of accessing a web page. The former is more transactional and conditional in nature. Today a mobile user does not have easy access to the breadth of familiar enterprise desktop (e.g. e-mail, appointments book, expense reporter) that are important to his/her productivity. Frequently, the user has a different service to perform the same task on a mobile device, than on the desktop. On occasion, the different databases are synchronizable, but still require user action to keep them synchronized. In some cases (e.g., Microsoft’s Hotmail on some Motorola Nextel phones), the software provider gives seamless access to a tool across the desktop and the mobile, but this seamlessness is achieved for only one service type rather than for the entire suite of services. The goal in the Arches project is to provide an architecture for enterprise tool capabilities to be exported to cell phones in a uniform, principled manner. Since Jini and Java have significant momentum in the enterprise space, we leverage that momentum by tying the thin-client interconnect architecture to Jini. In particular, we build on the Jini Surrogate Architecture, a specification that proposes an intermediary that mediates between the thin-client and the Jini network (which in turn has access to enterprise tools on the wired network). Section 2 overviews Jini, and Section 3 introduces the Jini surrogate architecture. In Section 4 we classify the Proceedings of the 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2002 0-7695-1435-9/02 $17.00 (c) 2002 IEEE 1