Software engineering for mobility: reflecting on the past, peering into the future

Abstract

At the end of the second millennium, mobility was a hot research topic. Physical mobility of devices was becoming commonplace with the availability of cheap wireless cards, the first attempts to transform phones into personal do-it-all devices were beginning to appear, and mobile ad hoc networks were attracting a huge interest from many research communities. Logical mobility of code was still going strong as a design option for distributed systems, with the Java language providing some of the ready-to-use building blocks. In 2000, when we put forth a research "roadmap" for software engineering for mobility, the challenges posed by this dynamic scenario were many.A decade and a half later, many things have changed. Mobility is no longer exotic: we juggle multiple personal devices every day while on the move, plus we grab and update applications on a whim from virtual stores. Indeed, some trends and visions we considered in our original paper materialized, while others faded, disappeared, or morphed into something else. Moreover, some players unexpected at the time (e.g., cloud computing and online social networks) appeared on the scene as game changers.In this paper we revisit critically our original vision, reflecting on the past and peering into the future of the lively and exciting research area of mobility. Further, we ask ourselves to what extent the software engineering community is still interested in taking up the challenges mobility bears.

Towards Establishing a Catalogue of Patterns for Architecting Mobile Cloud Software

“…(2) Resource Sufficient and Elastic Cloud Layer acts as a back-end to the off-loaded data by mobile device that allows scalable and virtually unlimited storage and processing resources [2,7]. As in Figure 2, the mobile-cloud computing can empower its users by unifying the features such as context-sensitivity, location-awareness and mobility at the mobile computing layer, with virtually unlimited computation and storage resources of cloud computing.…”

“…Specifically, for the mobile computing aspects of the MCC systems the main characteristics of the quality refer to the context-awareness, mobility, efficiency and security of the mobile data [1,2]. In contrast to mobile, the cloud based systems exploit the principle of service-orientation that enables service composition as a foundation to develop cloud-based applications [15,22].…”

“…Such devices with embedded sensors (hardware) and freely available mobile apps (software) have empowered users to perform a variety of tasks ranging from mobile commerce to health and fitness monitoring [2]. However, a mobile device is considered as a resource-constrained computer that lacks the energy, efficiency and quality of service for computation and memory-intensive tasks [3,4].…”

“…The unification of mobile and cloud as Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) represents the state-of-the-art mobile computing technology that aims to minimize the resource poverty of mobile devices by exploiting the resource sufficient cloud-based software and hardware services [6,7]. Despite the benefits of MCC technology, a number of challenges must be addressed while architecting and developing MCC systems [1,2,6]. Moreover, a rapid demand for developing mobile cloud based software requires a number of highly knowledgeable and experienced architects who may not be widely available as MCC has recently emerged as an innovative technology [2].…”

“…Despite the benefits of MCC technology, a number of challenges must be addressed while architecting and developing MCC systems [1,2,6]. Moreover, a rapid demand for developing mobile cloud based software requires a number of highly knowledgeable and experienced architects who may not be widely available as MCC has recently emerged as an innovative technology [2]. Architectural styles and patterns have been used for providing packaged knowledge about well-known design solutions to both experienced and novice architects [8,9].…”