1 Introduction
Recent advances in hardware technologies, such
as portable computers and wireless communication
networks, have led to the emergence of mobile computing
systems. No one challenges the idea that
mobile computing offers many opportunities for research
within the Computer Science area. However,
one could ask are there really any new database
problems introduced when a mobile computing environment
is assumed. We feel that the status of
data management in mobile computing is similar
to that of distributed data management versus centralized
data management in the late 60s. Namely
that many of the issues are the same, but the solutions
are different. This analogy has been raised by
others [1, 12]. We use this as the basis by which we
answer the above question. We concentrate on discussing
the differences between data management
solutions in a mobile computing environment and
those in a distributed database environment.
The purpose of this paper is twofold: to spawn
further interest in mobile computing research and
to convince the skeptics that there are new research
topics in mobile computing worthy of further exam