An architecture for exporting environment awareness to mobile computing 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 adapt to these changes so that available resources are properly utilized. We propose an architecture for exporting awareness of the mobile computing environment to an application. In this architecture, a change in the environment is modeled as an asynchronous event that includes information related to the change. Events are typed and are organized as an extensible class hierarchy so that they can be handled at different levels of abstraction according to the requirement of each application. We also compare two approaches to structure an adaptive application. One addresses the problem of incorporating adaptiveness into legacy applications, while the other considers the design of an application with adaptiveness in mind.