Towards a Technology Agnostic Approach to Developing Mobile Applications and Services

Today’s mobile devices and networks enable the development of novel mobile service applications. Developing such applications raises many challenges including heterogeneity in terms of mobile operating systems and APIs, service availability and scalability, and providing for the diverse communication needs of different applications. In this paper, we present an overview of the Odin middleware platform whose aim is to address these challenges. Odin utilises a surrogate-based architectural model to promote a mobile service’s scalability and availability. The middleware is reconfigurable, allowing mobile applications to adapt to changing operating conditions and minimise resource consumption. It also includes an optimised communication channel that masks the complexity of interacting with mobile services over mobile telecommunications networks. Using Odin’s interfaces and standards compliance, mobile applications and services with consistent communication behaviour can be easily implemented on heterogeneous platforms. Through quantitative evaluation, Odin’s message-based communication primitives have been demonstrated to perform favourably with leading industry push messaging providers.