The relentless development of mobile wireless technologies has given rise to novel applications and services to meet the needs of businesses for cost-effective, highly efficient, and robust operations and to provide a richer experience for consumers. These developments in turn raise research issues and challenges.
1. Mobile Localization and Location-Based Services
Not until the era of mobile computing did physical location become a critical issue for mobile applications and services. Questions relevant to a user’s location include: Where am I? What information is available in the vicinity? What is happening in the places I am interested in? How did I get there? Where are other people I know or I want to know? In some cases, the network operator may be asked to report the location of the user with a mobile device. These challenging questions effectively motivate the convergence of mobile positioning and tracking technologies, either indoor or outdoor, with geographic information databases to create an adaptive virtual world for each user.
2. Ad hoc networks
An ad hoc network is a self-organized group of nodes without a fixed infrastructure. Each node in an ad hoc network depends on its neighboring nodes to communicate and collaborate with anyone else in a completely distributed manner. If nodes are free to move around, the topology of the network can constantly change, thus creating a mobile ad hoc network. Possible applications of ad hoc communication and collaboration between mobile devices include battlefields, conferences, sports stadiums, disaster relief efforts, and even in classrooms. The absence of a fixed infrastructure in an ad hoc network introduces some challenging issues such as dynamic network configuration, service discovery, and multihop routing. Because nodes in the network can constantly move, both the moving nodes and the affected stationary nodes must adapt to this change in terms of addressing and topology updates. In addition, a node must conduct a reliable and fast discovery process to determine which resources or services are available on which nodes while moving around. To access a resource and service shared by some nodes outside its transmission range, a node will rely on an efficient multihop routing mechanism to reach the destination node.
3. Integration of Heterogeneous
Wireless Networks The above trend of convergence of computing and communication poses certain challenges in the technical and business domains. Heterogeneous network infrastructures have to coexist and work with each other to support internetwork roaming and handoff and be transparent to users. Some trial tests of wireless LAN and cellular integration by wireless operators are already underway. Integrated mobility support and seamless handoff in hybrid wired and wireless networks and between multiple wireless networks have been explored by academic researchers.
4. Security and Privacy
As mobile computing works its way into every aspect of daily life, security and privacy concerns are becoming more pervasive. Without a well-designed security mechanism, reliable applications and services are not possible. In particular, in the wireless world, the topic of security is authentication, authorization, and accounting; We want technologies to assist us in our business and in daily life, not expose our privacy to others. It is paramount to design a highly secure mobile system that does not risk exposing sensitive privacy data. No doubt these mobile computing security and privacy issues will drive further mobile device research in their resolution.
5. Multimedia
Multimedia applications for mobile devices are emerging due to improvements in data transmission rates of 2.5G and 3G services. MNOs are seeking “killer apps” for these data services, and multimedia applications such as image/video messaging and mobile television are being considered. Unlike text-based communications, mobile audio and video communications targeting mobile devices (such as smart phones) must maintain both adaptability and high performance while facing fundamental design limitations such as power consumption, form factor, wireless connection bandwidth, and mobility. Some of these problems can be addressed by applying peer-to-peer technology.
6. Smart Devices and Smart Spaces
Given the diversity of wireless technologies, a mobile device such as a smart phone must be able to integrate multiple types of radio access. In particular, as a universal mobile terminal, a smart phone must be smart enough to detect which radio access is most suitable for the underlying application and then switch on the fly without user intervention. Each type of radio access must be optimized on the smart phone to minimize overall interference. For this, software radio, a technology that employs the same radio for different wireless protocols, may be the answer. In addition to being adaptive to different radio connections, a smart phone will also adjust its power consumption, display lighting, and wireless link bandwidth to favor a longer operation time when the battery is about to run out. Smart space improves the power of mobile computing by increasing the adaptability of smart devices everywhere in the physical environment. Embedded computers, information appliances, sensors, and people wearing mobile computers or smart phones constitute smart space, which is able to organize and coordinate those components sensibly. The vision of smart devices and smart spaces requires breakthroughs in many areas, including chip design, communication protocol design, middleware, and information retrieval.
7. Context-Aware Computing
In the mobile computing paradigm, context is defined as the collection of varying conditions and situations that exist in the user’s computing, physical, and social environment, such as user location, user movement, environmental noise, temperature, user activity, and any sensing data from accessible devices or other users. Context-aware computing is an attempt to take advantage of this contextual information to automatically optimize the operation of computing services for the user. A classic example of contextual applications is using a cell phone in a movie theater. The cell phone is equipped with wireless sensors that are able to detect dim light, high ambient noise, and slight body motion of the user, and it silently switches itself to vibration mode. Challenges in the domain of context-aware computing include context discovery and sensing, contextual data modeling and interpretation, contextual adaptation, and augmented context cognition.
8. HCI and Middleware
An important issue in mobile computing is human -computer interaction (HCI) on a mobile device, which requires research in areas such as speech recognition and processing, advanced computer vision, graphic user interface design, and interaction modeling. Middleware is another key component in the mobile computing framework, as it mediates the interaction with the networking kernel on behalf of the user and will keep users immersed in the broader computing space. Indeed, the challenging issues of next generation mobile computing briefly mentioned above do not cover every aspect of this extremely broad field. Certainly some issues have been left out. For example, quality of service (QoS) in wireless networks has been actively researched in the networking community for years. In the mobile world, QoS implies building a networking infrastructure, mobile terminals, and software that provides as reliable and adaptive connectivity as possible according to a set of performance metrics. The big picture of next-generation mobile computing calls for dramatic advances in research and development of many research areas, including mobile hardware, wireless sensing, networking, software design, middleware, and HCI. Needless to say, it is literally impossible to cover all the challenges in these rapidly changing areas. This article focuses on networking-related issues, as well as service and application design issues, using the smart phone as a vehicle for discussion and analysis of terminal design and service delivery.
Summary
As explained in this article, mobile computing is a very broad field, encompassing wireless enabling technologies, wireless networks, novel service and applications, standardization, and of course business perspectives and opportunities. This book taps into this fast-paced, diverse domain by focusing on cutting-edge advances in mobile computing research and development in both industry and academia, with the aim of bridging the gap between mobile computing research and business-focused commercial mobile application and service development. We have included a brief summary of industry practice and recent commercial developments to provide some insight for industry professionals who have understood the key ideas and want to see how they work in the real world. A solid understanding of the technical foundations (such as protocols and algorithms) of current technologies, systems, and networks is essential for everyone working in this field; therefore, for each topic covered in the remaining chapters, an in-depth discussion of these foundations is presented in such a way that a reader with an average background in computing technologies will benefit from it.
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