Mobile Architectures at Runtime: Research Challenges

Mobile applications interact with devices, networks, environments and pervasive services and at runtime these interactions can continuously change and adapt, causing side effects. In this paper, we propose the usage of architectural models at runtime to allow software engineers monitor the structural changes of a mobile system. Architectural models at runtime have previously been proposed in the literature and providing them to mobile software engineers can help them to maintain and evolve mobile applications by taking just in time actions in fixing problems more quickly or decide to disable certain services. We discuss the motivation and outline several research challenges for providing a conceptual framework and tool for mobile architecture at runtime support. We also discuss a solution to one of the challenges.