Mobile Processes: Enhancing Cooperation in Distributed Mobile Environments

Abstract

Currently, context awareness is one of the main trends in distributed mobile computing environments. Against this background, the demand for more complex – and additionally long-term – mobile applications increases continuously. Nevertheless, most current available mobile applications – as well as their supporting middleware platforms – are still relatively monolithic and closed systems, concentrating on only short-term activities. As a consequence, most present appliances are still restricted to rather simple tasks and are therefore rather insufficient for more complex ones which consist of sequences of related long-term activities tied together in respective application-oriented processes. In order to overcome the resource and capability restrictions of mobile environments, such application processes may profit from, e.g., cooperation between devices in the mobile vicinity – a fact which is hardly supported by existing systems. Therefore, this paper introduces a concept for integrating explicit support for mobile processes into mobile system infrastructures and for distributing their execution over different nodes in the network. Additionally, a corresponding middleware platform for context-aware and cooperative mobile applications is proposed. This framework has been designed and realized in the context of project DEMAC (Distributed Environment for Mobility-Aware Computing) which supports such migrating processes and helps to execute them under the restrictions imposed by realistic mobile applications. In particular, this paper proposes a corresponding process description language and an execution model for such mobile (business) processes.