Push Notification Mechanisms for Pervasive Smartphone Applications

Smartphones have emerged as ubiquitous devices that are being used to host a rich array of pervasive apps in diverse areas, including healthcare, gaming, and social networking. A key requirement of many of these apps is that they keep their mobile users up-to-date as changes occur in some subject of interest. One way of providing timely updates to smartphone apps is to use push notification technology. In this article, the authors identify design issues for push notification systems and reveal underlying concepts for the notification channels that bind mobile devices to push services. They describe five service offerings and report on the performance of their channels based on an empirical study.