A framework for environment aware mobile applications

In mobile computing, factors such as add-on hardware components and heterogeneous networks result in an environment of changing resource constraints. An application in such a constrained environment must react to these changes so that available resources are properly utilized. In this paper, we propose a framework to build environment aware applications. The architecture is based on an event delivery mechanism that decouples event detection from delivery, giving the flexibility and extensibility that is necessary in a mobile computing environment. Information associated with the event is delivered as part of the event notification, while delivery latency is reduced by clever thread scheduling. We demonstrate the utility of this framework by structuring an environment aware networking subsystem around a prototype implementation. The performance of this implementation is competitive with current event delivery mechanisms such as the Unix signal.