Experiences from Ramping Up an Environment for Mobile Information Access

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive summary of the insights and experiences which a team of computer scientists and communications engineers gained during the ambitious three-year project Heywow in the field of mobile and ubiquitous computing. The project had started with a purely architecture-driven approach and with the goal to demonstrate the benefits of a mobile computing infrastructure applied to real-world showcases. The paper describes why, during the course of the project, the architecture-driven approach sometimes proved to be unsuitable to tackle real-world constraints and requirements. Several reasons, e.g. frequently changing device road-maps, made architectural adaptations necessary. This resulted in a trade-off between desirable architectural design iterations and inevitable design circumventions, which finally led to an architecture and software components that proved to be flexible, robust and fit to meet the relevant real-world requirements.