Event-Driven Mobile Computing with Objects

This chapter focuses on programming abstractions for mobile computing (Mascolo, Capra, & Emmerich, 2002), a research domain that studies Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing (Weiser, 1991) from a distributed systems’ perspective. Mobile computing applications are deployed on mobile devices (e.g. cellular phones, PDAs, ...) equipped with wireless communication technology (e.g. WiFi, Bluetooth,...). Such devices form so-called mobile ad hoc networks, which are characterized by the fact that connectivity between devices is often intermittent (connections drop and are restored as devices physically move about) and the fact that there is little or no fixed support infrastructure, such that devices can often communicate only with physically proximate devices. Event-based coordination is a natural fit for such networks. Events can be disseminated to multiple nearby interested parties (subscribers) without necessarily knowing the exact identity aBsTRaCT