State of the Art and Future Trends in Distributed Systems and Ubiquitous 
Computing 

Friedemann Mattern 

Abstract 

This report summarizes trends in communication paradigms for distributed 
systems, mentions established and new software infrastructures for distributed 
systems (such as CORBA and Jini), and gives an overview of mobile code and 
mobile agent principles. It then explains the vision of Ubiquitous Computing 
and future networked smart devices including techniques such as RFID tags (or 
"smart labels"). It also discusses issues in spontaneous networking, service 
discovery, and related concepts. The report quotes liberally from a number of 
online resources found on the Web. 

Keywords: RPC, RMI, software bus, publish/subscribe, CORBA, Jini, mobile 
code, mobile agents, pervasive computing, smart devices, spontaneous 
networking, context awareness, smart labels, RFID tags, middleware, 
distributed systems, ubiquitous computing