Extended AbstractSeamless mobility is a term that encompasses a broad range of technologies and applications. It builds on technology developments in the wireless industry over the last 20 years, starting with mobile telephony, on through mobile IP, convergence of voice and data, and now towards an ever-increasing rate of convergence/collision between the worlds of secure communication, content, and computing. It is well accepted that in each of these domains, that there is exponential growth in capabilities, with a doubling of capabilities in communication technologies every 9 months, in memory technology (storage/content) every 12 months, and in computing technologies (processing) every 18 months. These fundamental increases in the underlying technologies bring increasing value to users in each of these domains. And as Ray Kurzweil makes the case in the "Law of AcceleratingReturns" (http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html), these rates are really growing as a double exponential when measured over longer intervals -i.e. the doubling times are reducing over time.In addition to these "hard" technologies, there are also advances in software, secure systems, algorithms, architecture, frameworks, and platforms, which also lead to significant growth in value to the user. Again following Kurzweil, we assert that the hardware technology growth is not sufficient to explain the growth. As he states, "The organization and content of these resources -the software of intelligence -is also critical." Less well accepted than Moore's law, is the exponential growth in software driven capabilities, of which Kurzweil gives the example of automatic speech recognition. We could equally well give examples in coding technologies (voice, still images, video, etc.), compression, security algorithms, relational queries, etc.Given these exponential growths in both the hard and soft technologies, we attempt in this presentation to better understand the value of mobility, the additional value of seamless mobility, the different factors that influence it, and the impact of value synergy resulting from the exponential growths in the underlying factors.Consider first some boundary/extreme points in this (3-dimensional hard technology space) of how these technologies have delivered value to users. In the world of mainframe computing, both processing and storage were integrated into large computers, and provided service to users through dumb terminals connected through low-bandwidth communication channels. Another extreme point is as envisioned for instance in the CAL-(IT) 2 Transputing project where we have the possibility of creating "pure" processing engines and "pure" storage engines, interconnected through ever increasing communication bandwidths (>10 Gbits/sec). A third extreme point is where processing and storage are purely local in the user device.We frame this problem in the above manner to define the central tenet of seamless mobility -namely that the goal of seamless mobility is to make the underlying technology points in thi...
