A Generic Architecture Supporting Context-Aware Data and Transaction Management for Mobile Applications

Abstract

Mobile applications claim to operate reliably during spatial movement, however, developers have to deal with the effects of changing environmental contexts. One of the most important contexts is the connectivity of mobile devices. Since mobile applications are increasingly used as front-ends of transaction systems, they have to be designed for being able to deal with intentional or accidental loss of connection. In fact, we find a lot of mobile applications being not more than portable because they cannot operate without connections. In order to support higher mobility - in the sense that operations may execute across the boundaries of changing network states - we discuss the problem and requirements for context-aware architectures of mobile applications. We present a generic architecture supporting users to effectively use applications on-line as well as off-line. This approach enables the concurrent execution of off-line transactions as well as their durability after synchronization. Starting from example applications, we analyze the design of existing context-aware architectures and corresponding mobile transaction models and present our approach to a generic architecture. Furthermore, we frame various conditions for advantageously using mobile transaction models.