Impact of Compression and Encryption Methods for Software Architectures in Data-Oriented Mobile Applications

Mobile applications have evolved to become extensions of enterprise applications and systems that often interact with remote data sources and databases. Two software architectural approaches have emerged as the primary ways to develop mobile applications accessing remote data sources: client-agent-server and client-interceptserver. Both make use of middleware with the main difference being in the way agent components are used. Our previous compared the performance of these architectural approaches under differing sizes of data retrieved and with and without caching at the middleware. In this paper we compare these architectures in similar data scenarios but looking at the impact of data compression and encryption on the performance of the two approaches. Statistical analysis shows that the client-agent-approach generally performs better, though not in all circumstances. The results of this research provide useful guidelines for developing mobile applications needing to connect to remote databases.