The Challenges of Mobile Computing

One-line summary: Surrounding mobile computing are a number of challenges; radio characteristics are inherently poor, mobility implies address migration and location dependency, and portability implies limitations on physical device characteristics.

Overview/Main Points

• Wireless communications: Wireless links are qualitatively different than wireline links - the bandwidth, latency, variability, and reliability of wireline links all pale in comparison to wireline links. Rapid changes in quality imply the need for highly adaptive applications that can possibly even support disconnected operation, implying a level of autonomy. Wireless links are less secure.
• Mobility: Address migration (eg. mobile-IP) is required; common solutions include selective broadcast, centralized name services, forwarding pointers, and home-base. Because of mobility, location dependent information can exist - resource discovery, privacy, and the migration of locality become import issues.
• Portability: Portable computers face physical challenges (volume, weight, power consumption, cost), pragmatic challenges (increased chance of data loss, small user-interface issues), and systems issues (network integration, resource imbalance such as lack of local storage, impoverished computational power).

Relevance

Flaws

• The paper concentrates mostly on the current state-of-affairs; while it does so accurately, it does not speculate on future issues to any large degree. (Perhaps this isn't a flaw but a feature.) As promised by the title of the paper, challenges are presented, not solutions.
• Data services are overemphasized and voice services largely ignored. This is, however, consistent with the computer-science perspective put on the paper.
• There is a peceivable lack of depth in this paper - only very broad descriptive strokes are painted.