MOSS: A Mobile Operating System Substrate

Abstract

The Mobile Operating System Substrate (MOSS) is a new system architecture for wireless mobile computing being developed at Harvard. MOSS provides highly efficient, robust and flexible virtual device access over wireless media. MOSS services provide mobile access to such resources as disks, CD ROM drives, displays, wired network interfaces, and audio and video devices. MOSS services are composed of virtual circuits and virtual devices. Virtual circuits (VCs) on wireless media support the spectrum of quality-of-service (QoS) levels required to cover a broad range of application requirements. Virtual devices implement resource access using VCs as their communication substrate. The tight coupling of network code and device implementations makes it possible to apply device-specific semantics to communications resource management problems. MOSS will enable mobile software systems to adapt dynamically to the rapidly changing computing and communications environment created by mobility.