Architecture for Adaptive Mobile Applications

Abstract

Mobile computing is a relatively new field. While the challenges arising from mobility and the limitations of the portable devices are relatively well understood, there is no consensus yet as to what should be done to address these challenges. A comprehensive solution has to address many different aspects, such as the issue of dynamically changing bandwidth, the power, computational, and other limitations of the portable devices, or the varying availability of services in different environments. In this paper, we present our architecture for such adaptive mobile applications. We motivated the architecture by classifying likely mobile applications and identified common properties. The architecture intends to be more general than previous work with respect to adaptability, flexibility, and user mobility. We developed various pieces of the overall architecture and collected some preliminary experience with adaptive mobile applications. We give an overview of the intersection of the areas of software architecture and mobile applications. We consider the mobile applications, which represent the computing functionality designed to migrate across hardware devices at runtime and execute on mobile hardware platforms, and the mobile systems, which are computing applications that include mobile software and hardware elements. We are developing the components of a flexible and general-purpose runtime infrastructure to facilitate the rapid development and deployment of such adaptive mobile applications. We will evaluate our infrastructure by implementing a number of wireless applications and by building simulation tools to validate the scalability of our architecture when considering metropolitan and provincial cellular systems.