1. The Challenges of Mobile Computing. G. Forman and J. Zahorjan. UW
CSE. 1994.
Despite the fact that this paper was written ten years ago, the issues
of wireless communication, mobility, portability and security surveyed
by this paper are very much relevant today. In fact, the challenges
have only increased with the explosion of mobile devices in the form of
cellular phones, laptop computers, PDAs and MP3 players. There is also
an increasing demand of network bandwidth and resources from every
device. The paper organizes various concerns into three core parts and
discusses each one of them in detail. The paper then discusses in detail
the challenges faced in each of these areas and mentions few efforts to
solve the problem. The paper also presents few high level statistics
like bandwidth demand, CPU demand and power demands. The paper also
points out few ideas to improve the problem situation. Overall, the
paper does a good job of covering all the critical topics like locality,
resource demand and security.
Being a survey paper, the authors have limited themselves to merely
mentioning several issues. This might be useful to a casual reader, but
does not provide adequate information for an interested researcher. The
authors could have provided more pointers towards the active research
areas and upcoming projects. The authors have also not mentioned much
about failed attempts to solve some of these problems. One of the areas
that this paper have missed out is the pressure faced by researchers in
packing more and more functionality within the small mobile devices.
For example, cellular phones now couples as a camera, a gaming console,
a GPS, a browser and much more. Tremendous amount of innovations in
hardware and software are needed to accommodate the diverse functionalities.
Following are some of the issues that are very much alive today and
might require enormous amount of research focus in the coming years:
a. Wireless disconnection problems are still an issue particularly in
extreme weather conditions. Wireless signals still fail during natural
events like thunder storms and solar electro magnetic storms.
b. There have been a substantial amount of bandwidth increases in the
recent years. But again the demands on the available bandwidth has
increased exponentially too. For example, earlier the mobile phones
were used only for telephonic conversation. But now all sort of
information is being transfered, right from text to images to even video.
c. Security issues are gaining more and more attention with the spread
of worms and viruses. Recently there has been a news about faking of
Wi-Fi hotspots. Privacy thefts are increasing since the mobile devices
are used for storing all sorts of personal information. Mobile security
alone has the potential to become a major research area by itself.
d. With the availability of wireless internet connection on aircrafts,
mobility will have a whole new meaning. Users will be crossing
continents, not small regions, in a matter of few hours.
e. Demand for battery power have also increased tremendously with the
advent of features like browsing, camera, video conversation, speech
recognition, games and personal information management.
f. Even by conservative estimates, it seems that a third (around 2
billion) of the world population will have a mobile device in the next
20 years. This will create problems unpredictable even at this point in
time.