Special Issue About “Recent Advances on MOBILe Wireless MiddleWARE, Operating Systems, and Applications”

Abstract

The advances in wireless communication technologies and the proliferation of mobile devices have enabled the realization of intelligent or smarter environments for people to communicate with each other, interact with information processing devices, and receive a wide range of mobile wireless services through various types of networks and systems everywhere and anytime. This emerging “Internet of Things” will dramatically modify our lives, allowing progress in various domains, such as health support, ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems), energy efficiency, and security. A key enabler of this pervasive and ubiquitous connectivity environment is the advancement of software technologies in various communication sectors, ranging from sensor technologies, operating systems, communication middleware to networking protocols and applications. The international ICST conference series on Mobile Wireless Middleware, Operating Systems, and Applications (MOBILWARE) is dedicated to address these emerging topics and challenges in various mobile wireless software-related areas. The scope of the conference includes the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of middleware, operating systems, and applications for computing and communications in mobile wireless systems. This special issue features extensions of five of the best papers of the MOBILWARE 2009 conference, which took place in Berlin, Germany in April 2009 and also illustrates accurately the scope of the conference. The incredible development of mobile devices leads most of us to have a large processing capacity in the pocket. Nevertheless some applications still require too much processing to be easily implementable in smart phones. In the first paper, Andre C. Santos et al. study the possibility to implement an autonomous navigation algorithm on smart-phones using the standard Java machine (J2ME). This algorithm controls a robot and relies on image processing and path planning which are quiet demanding. Even if it is possible to perform demanding tasks on a smart phone, it is reasonable to rely on the ubiquitous Internet connectivity to use servers in the cloud to alleviate processing and battery constraints. The behavior of the network could be adapted to the context in which the mobile terminal operates to be more efficient and to provide a better service to the customer. Josephine Antoniou et al. present in the second paper a multicast session management framework which is able to create and evolve session depending on the terminal context. Simplifying the development of new applications and reducing the time to market for new applications and services is also a challenge that has to be tackled. Florian J.-M. Bonnin (*) Institut Telecom / Telecom Bretagne, Universite europeenne de Bretagne, Rennes, France e-mail: jm.bonnin@telecom-bretagne.eu