Ch01 - Introduction to Mobile Computing

____________ are computing systems that may be easily moved physically and whose computing capabilities may be used while they are being moved. Examples are laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and mobile phones.

One of the very first computing machines, the _______, which was used as far back as 500 B.C., was, in effect, a mobile computing system because of its small size and portability.

(T/F) A mobile computing system, as with any other type of computing system, can be connected to a network. Connectivity to the network, however, is not a prerequisite for being a mobile computing system.
True False

Dating from the late _____, networking two or more computers together allowed computers to talk to each other through wired networks.

By the 1960s, the military developed wireless communication through _______: If there were no obstacles between point A and point B, you could send and receive electromagnetic waves

By the 1970s, ________ began to be commercialized.

In the _____ cellular telephony technologies became commercially viable and the _____ were witness to advances in cellular technologies that made wireless data communication financially feasible in a pervasive way.

(T/F) Mobile computing devices need not be wireless. Laptop computers, calculators, electronic watches, and many other devices are all mobile computing devices. None of them use any sort of wireless communication means to connect to a network.
True False

(T/F) Wireless communication systems are a type of communication system. What distinguishes a wireless communication system from others is that the communication channel is space itself.
True False

_______ is the set of properties that distinguishes the mobile user from the user of a typical, stationary computing system.

________ are the set of properties that distinguishes the mobile computing system from the stationary computing system.

Dimensions of mobility:

_________ is the mere ability of the architecture of the mobile application to accommodate logic that allows the selection of different business logic, level of work flow, and interfaces based on a given set of location information commonly referred to as locales.

_________ is the ability of the device and the software application to first obtain location information while being used and then to take advantage of this location information in offering features and functionality

_________ relies on age-old geometric methods that allow calculation of the location of a point that lies in the middle of three other points whose exact locations are known.

based methods measure the relative position of the unknown point to some known point.

_________ relies on image processing and topographical techniques to calculate the location of the unknown point based on a view of the unknown point from a known point.

The most well-known location sensing system today is ____-enabled devices can obtain latitude and longitude with accuracy of about 1–5 m.

____________ promises to be one of the biggest drivers of mobile applications as it allows for the introduction of new business models and fundamentally new methods of adding productivity to business systems.

means loss of network connectivity reliability.

Moving from one physical location to another creates physical barriers that nearly guarantee some disconnected time from the network.

The mobile device’s physical size limitation imposes boundaries on volatile storage, nonvolatile storage, and CPU on mobile devices.

(T/F) When it comes to mobile systems and devices, smaller is nearly always better.
True False

(T/F) Mobile applications must be designed to optimize the use of data storage and processing power of the device in terms of the application use by the user.
True False

_______ are the primary power source for mobile devices.

This constraint must be balanced with the processing power, storage, and size constraints; the battery is typically the largest single source of weight in the mobile device.

Stationary users use nonmobile applications while working on a PC or a similar device. The keyboard, mouse, and monitor have proved to be fairly efficient user interfaces for such applications.

_________ are systems that use multiple types of user interfaces for input and output such as text, voice, and video.

Because mobile devices are small and there is much less hardware in them than in a PC, they are typically less costly to assemble for a manufacturer. This means that more manufacturers can compete in producing these devices.

Most of today’s stationary applications have a restriction that can reduce the benefits of a mobile application system enormously: The user of the system must initiate all interactions with the system.

they are in a passive state, waiting for some external signal from the user to tell them to start doing some particular thing.

In the _________ of communication, an information producer announces the availability of certain types of information, an interested consumer subscribes to this information, and the producer periodically publishes the information.

_________, by definition, are active systems.

(T/F) All active transactions are initiated by the system.
True False

________ are time-dependent transactions

______ is used in data storage and other systems to indicate boundaries for roll-back and committing of a series of actions that must be successfully executed.

__________ is a sequence of interactions between the user and the computing system.

___________ are not time-dependent

Mobile conditions:

Mobile users are often in a situation where they need to quickly perform one or more computing tasks, such as retrieving contact information, sending a voice or e-mail message, or triggering some remote process. They don’t have the time to go through a long boot sequence or long application setup times.

The primary focus of the mobile user is seldom on the computing task (although, obviously, there are exceptions to this, but we are talking about the majority of time when the user has a device and is mobile). This is the primary reason for the necessity of active transactions.

It may seem trivial to state that a mobile user is always, or at least frequently, moving.

The mobile user needs to be able to stop performing some computing task abruptly, do something that may be completely unrelated, then return to the application after some unknown period of time, and, without much effort to remember what he or she had been doing, continue the computing task.

The mobile user expects to be able to retrieve data and do computing at any given moment and any given time.

(T/F) The mobile condition of the mobile user should be the primary guiding tool in architecting, designing, and implementing the mobile application.
True False

(T/F) The first step in building a software application, after the process of gathering requirements, is to lay down a high-level plan of what the application will be like when it is finished.
True False

Mobile applications, like any other software application, require such a high-level plan. We call this high-level plan of the mobile application a ________________.

__________ are particular high-level abstraction of the system and how its components collaborate.

these are patterns that are recognizable once they are used prevalently in some architectures.