Wireless Access and Terminal Mobility in CORBA

The Object Management Group has recently published the Wireless Access and Terminal Mobility in CORBA standard — Wireless CORBA for short. The specification enables mobility transparency of objects on a mobile terminal through a mobile Interoperable Object Reference (mobile IOR). A GIOP tunneling protocol is used to handle handoffs between access bridges even when the access technology changes. The current standard supports TCP, UDP, WAP WDP and Bluetooth L2CAP transports. The mobility management is based on principles of the current GSM network. The CORBA ORB is, however, only involved in handoffs between bridging domains, whereas mobility inside a bridging domain is handled by Mobile IP and/or link level mechanisms. The Wireless CORBA specification also provides the basic means to discover and resolve initial object references in the home and visited domains.