Software Development for Mobile Computing, the Internet of Things and Wearable Devices: Inspecting the Past to Understand the Future

Abstract

Currently a convergence in software development for mobile computing (including mobile devices and special technology such as wearables) and the Internet of Things (IoT) can be observed. Devices from the fields are becoming part of a joint ecosystem and share the same infrastructure. Moreover, development processes have changed and user requirements have become very heterogeneous. We have been studying this development for a while, also by offering the fitting HICSS minitrack. In this article, we look into the past of software development for mobile devices, in the context of IoT, and for wearables. We analyse joint characteristics and show differences. Then we invite to a discussion that leads to a research outlook. While neither for industry nor for academia the journey is over, the convergence of fields should offer many new possibilities, prevent problems we faced in the past, but also introduce novel challenges.

A Bibliometric Analysis of the HICSS Software Technology Track

“…Conference Web sites back then looked much differently and the scientific output (in quantitative terms) was much lower, with typical scholars 1 publishing much fewer papers per year than they do now. 2 Even though there is good indexation, a lack of original sources make it hard to verify the results in databases. For example, the computer science bibliography DBLP lists HICSS starting from 1994 [15].…”

“…Recently, we have seen rising importance of software engineering for mobile computing, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) [2]. That is why we have introduced a new minitrack to the Software Technology track, which in its 2020 edition includes all of these topics.…”

“…i.e. not scholars like Paul Erdős 2. Likely, the number of scholars particularly from regions rather recently focussing on science has increased, and new tools enable more rapid paper writing; however, substantiating such claims would…”

5G Wireless systems: Is it the future?

“…The base stations required by the cellular providers will be small and use less power as compared to using powerful macro-cells so that they are able to offer multi-gigabit speeds that have been promised to the customers. Usually the macro-cells use about 20-40W but these small stations will use 2-10W [7] . During the 4G era, these small cells that are required for rapid communication and transmission were already installed to increase the capacity of the cells.…”