A Catalog of Architectural Styles for Mobility

Network-aware applications centered around the Internet and the WWW require special architectural patterns. An important feature in network applications is mobility; however, it is still unclear which entities can be mobile (e.g.. data, references, code, agents, operating environments) and especially why and when they should move over the network. In this paper we describe and compare a series of architectural styles for mobile, network aware applications. We classify the styles according to what entities are moving, and specify their features using MobiS, a specification language based on a “chemical” coordination model. We explore the styles we introduce showing how they model the software architecture of a “Purchasing System”, a case study in electronic commerce. 1. University of Bologna, Department of Computer Science, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, 40127 Bologna, Italy. E-mail: fciancarini, [email protected]