Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Mobile middleware: embracing the personal communication device

Abstract

The rise of relatively powerful communication devices and in particular mobile phones has enabled the deployment of a large spectrum of novel applications, such as context-aware applications, health-care monitoring, sport tracking, collaborative computing, etc. Extending middleware approaches designed for mobile computing environments to personal communication devices calls for an effective system design that can cope with the resource-constrained nature of such devices and provide adequate services when operating in highly heterogeneous environments. It is still unclear and in many respects an unexplored research area how and to what extent traditional middleware services for mobile computing can be provided on personal communication devices. Porting existing middleware architectures to new computing platforms such as mobile phones turns out to be, in many cases, an unfeasible approach. Instead, mobile phones require a thorough rethinking of middleware architectures and their supporting software modules to allow applications to make an effective use of the available computational power, memory, and communication technologies. Additionally, programming novel computing devices such as mobile phones is still a complex and time consuming development process. The MobMid 2008 workshop was co-located with the Middleware 2008 Conference in Leuven, Belgium. MobMid was organized following the success of previously organized MiNEMA events. It allowed its participants (both young and senior researchers in the field) to foster exchange of ideas and provided lively discussions about the problems and solutions on building mobile middleware on the increasingly common personal communication devices.