Improving Resource Consumption in Context- Aware Mobile Applications Through Alternative Architectural Styles

Abstract

Over the last years, the Internet of Things has fostered a growing interest in context-aware mobile applications; this fact is mainly due to highly favoring information provision from multiple Internetconnected devices. To identify user context, these applications collect information from the user and his/her environment and typically filter app information, so that the user receives only the interesting and relevant information. However, such a task usually implies further resource consumption on user mobile devices, not only regarding battery usage but also in terms of network traffic. Accordingly, although context-aware applications can improve user experiences in their daily lives, they must ensure the maintenance of lowlevel resource consumption; otherwise, the applications are promptly replaced by less consuming ones, and therefore, removed from the mobile market. In this paper, we evaluate and discuss several architectural styles for context-aware mobile applications, as well as, providing a set of guidelines to decide on the right architecture for a particular app depending on its characteristics. The use of such guidelines when choosing the right architectural style can strongly influence the resource consumption of context-aware mobile applications. Following these guidelines, user satisfaction of a context-aware mobile application may be improved, thus guaranteeing the app success.

Early Evaluation of Mobile Applications’ Resource Consumption and Operating Costs

“…Specifically, in [46] the authors examine the resource consumption of a mobile app for exchanging information between contacts in which GPS positioning is not considered. Similarly, in [21] the framework is used for estimating the consumption of a context aware application.…”

“…For example, in order to improve a dimension of the user satisfaction, the development team might evaluate the reduction of mobile devices' resource consumption by offloading some of the application's features to the cloud [21]. If the number of users remains under control, this could well be a good decision with an affordable cost.…”

“…The framework also estimates the trends in consumption as the number of users increases or when how they use the application changes. This framework has also being applied for estimating the consumption of context-aware mobile applications [21]. The study does not, however, analyse operating costs when some tasks are offloaded to the cloud.…”

eGEN: An Energy-saving Modeling Language and Code Generator for Location-sensing of Mobile Apps

“…In particular, identifying relevant context information for energy-saving at run-time is not a straightforward task [5]. On the other hand, few researchers have proposed generic solutions to address energy-efficiency issues of Android applications [7,40] by combining self-adaptivity and battery awareness. In this paper, we have investigated the impact of a concept called "self-adaptive location-sensing" by combining dynamic adaptability and battery awareness.…”

Power Consumption Analysis, Measurement, Management, and Issues: A State-of-the-Art Review of Smartphone Battery and Energy Usage

“…many people use their smartphones for different specific purposes. Apps for fitness, mobile health [240], m-learning [104], contextaware applications and services [241], [242], etc. are very common nowadays.…”