Recent Advances in Mobile Middleware for Wireless Systems and Services

Abstract

The most visible technology advance in the last decade is arguably the popular uses of wireless mobile handsets such as cellular phones. These devices are not just for phone calls, but also for the Internet access and management of mobile data. Many of them are equipped with positioning systems such as GPS, creating significant commercial opportunities for a range of new applications such as location-based services. Indeed, despite the recent economic downturn, the mobile computing industry continues to boom. A crucial technological challenge to develop applications for wireless mobile handsets is to deal with their heterogeneity. There are a large number of models running different operating systems. They come with vastly different capabilities in terms of computing power and applications they can support, and unlike traditional computers such as desktops and laptops, many times the software development kits are manufacturer-specific or even model-specific. Targeting at different consumer groups, they are also designed with different considerations on key components such as wireless interfaces, screen size, with or without keyboard/accelerometer/GPS, and so on. Developing novel mobile middleware solutions appears to be a natural strategy to circumvent the heterogeneity problem. By allowing application developers to concentrate their efforts on application logic, without taking into account the device-specific issues, the development and deployment of applications over heterogeneous mobile devices can be greatly accelerated and simplified. It is motivated by this belief that in 2008 the International Conference on MOBILe Wireless MiddleWARE, Operating Systems, and Applications (Mobilware) was launched with the specific goal to identify, propose, validate, and spread the adoption of open and interoperable software-support solutions, specifically designed and implemented for wireless mobile handsets. The past 2008 and 2009 editions of Mobilware were highly successful, attracting a large number of high-quality technical submissions from both academic and industrial communities. Mobilware’10 follows this success with a technical program that covers a wide range of hot issues in research and practitioning of mobile middleware technologies. Some papers address network, systems, and service management issues in dependence of location and context. Some contributions relate to middleware interface management, architectures, and security. A considerable part of the program is devoted to new applications for mobile services, such as multimedia, wireless sensor and vehicular network applications, and surveillance systems. This special section of MONET is organized with the extended versions of the papers selected from the best P. Bellavista University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy