A Generic Multicast Transport Service to Support Disconnected Operation

RPC latencies and other network-related delays can frustrate mobile users of a distributed file system. Disconnected operation helps, but fails to use networking opportunities to their full advantage. In this paper we describe partially connected operation, an extension of disconnected operation that resolves cache misses and preserves client cache consistency, but does not incur the write latencies of a fully connected client. Benchmarks of partially connected mode over a slow network indicate overall system performance comparable to fully connected operation over Ethernet.