A Generic Coordination Architecture as an Enabler for Mobile Collaborative Applications

Recent technological advances in hardware manufacturing and wireless communication systems result in a tremendous increase of heterogeneous computing elements involved in mobile and pervasive environments. Therefore, the complexity of systems supporting mobile collaboration is steadily increasing. To guarantee a certain level of service quality, coordination of this manifold of entities is required. Current approaches in pervasive computing usually address this demand inappropriately and consequently, in here significant drawbacks when it comes to modularity, reusability, exchangeability, and extensibility of the implicit coordination mechanisms. This work proposes an explicit, generic two-layered coordination architecture which particularly aims at the specific characteristics of mobile and pervasive computing environments necessary for collaborative applications. This architecture comprises (i) the coordination media layer adhering to the decentralised space-based computing paradigm, and (ii) the coordination patterns layer proposing several problem-specific patterns. The idea is to provide a catalogue of reusable coordination patterns similar to the concept of software design patterns