Architectural Requirements for the Effective Support of Adaptive Mobile Applications

Mobile applications are required to operate in environments that change. Specifically, the availability of resources and services may change significantly during typical system operation. As a consequence, mobile applications need to be capable of adapting to these changes to ensure they offer the best possible level of service to the user. Our experiences of developing adaptive applications have led us to believe that existing middleware fails to provide the necessary support for such applications. Moreover, we believe that current research in this area is also failing to address the core requirements of adaptive mobile systems. In this paper we present a set of requirements for future mobile middleware which have been derived by considering the shortcomings of existing approaches and the needs of application developers. Key among these requirements is the need to support coordinated action between application and system components and the resolution of conflicts caused by the need to adapt to multiple contextual triggers. The paper concludes with the presentation of an architectural framework within which middleware researchers can deploy solutions to the problems identified.