¹Distributed Systems and Information Systems, Department of Informatics University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

---

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 longterm 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.

[PDF]

Cite: Christian P. Kunze, Sonja Zaplata, Winfried Lamersdorf, "Mobile Processes: Enhancing Cooperation in Distributed Mobile Environments," Journal of Computers vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1-11, 2007.