A software radio is a wireless communications device in which some or all of the physical layer functions are implemented in software. The flexibility provided by the software implementation enables a single device to interoperate with other devices using different wireless physical layer technologies, by simply invoking the appropriate software. A mobile computing device equipped with a software radio would have access to a wide range of connectivity options including cellular, wireless LAN and satellite systems. This would not only enable seamless anytime, anywhere connectivity, but also provide users the flexibility of choosing from the available connectivity options to best suit their price/performance requirements.

Most software radio research to date has been driven by military and commercial cellular applications. Mobile networking applications require additional functionality present new software radio design constraints. This paper reviews existing software radio research, describes the SpectrumWare software radio system and identifies some important research challenges that must be addressed in order to apply software radio research to mobile networking applications.

Condor is a distributed batch system for sharing the workload among the computers connected by a network. Condor distributed system was developed on the basis that every machine in a Condor pool is always connected by a network to run a Condor Job. Due to advances in wireless communication and mobile computing technology, conventional distributed computer systems can now include "mobile" clients as well as "fixed" clients. Moreover, mobile users want to be as low power as possible and benefit from offloading potentially power and resource consuming jobs. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of extended Condor to support mobile clients. The main purpose of this work is to enable users on mobile computers to interact with Condor environment any time anywhere regardless of their connection to a Condor pool. The mobile Condor distributed system also aims to provide mobile users the same Condor services without making any significant changes to the existing Condor system.

New mobility management protocols that aim to support terminal movement, in wireless ATM Customer Premises Networks (CPN) are presented. The functionality of these protocols consists of the procedures for handover (i.e., re-routing of active data connections to a new radio cell) and the procedures for location management (i.e., storing and retrieving the exact location of a mobile terminal). In the considered CPN environment, the ATM switches communicate using the PNNI protocol, the routing functionality of which is used by the mobility management protocols to perform their tasks more efficiently.