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Network latency is one of the most critical factors for the usability of mobile SOA applications. This paper introduces prefetching and caching enhancements for an existing SOA framework for mobile applications to reduce the user perceived latency. Latency reduction is achieved by proactively sending data to the mobile device that could most likely be requested at a later time. This additional data is piggybacked onto responses to actual requests and injected into a client side cache, so that it can be used without an additional connection. The prefetching is done automatically using a sequence prediction algorithm. The benefit of prefetching and caching enhancements were evaluated for different network settings and a reduction of user perceived latency of up to 31% was found in a typical scenario. In contrast to other prefetching solutions, our piggybacking approach also allows to significantly increase battery lifetime of the mobile device.

One of the main challenges in ubiquitous computing is making users interact with computing appliances in an easy and natural manner. In this paper we discuss how to turn ordinary devices into Smart Products that are more intuitive to use and are self-explanatory. We present a general architecture and a distributed runtime environment for building such Smart Products and discuss a number of user interaction issues. As an example, we describe our smart coffee machine and its validation through systematic user testing.