Towards a Mobile Middleware Product Line: A Requirement Analysis

Middleware has been extensively used in mobile devices to abstract issues raised by mobility, such as resource constraints, intermittent connectivity and platform variability. In such a sense, several proposals that explore mobile middleware concerns can be identified in the literature. However, in general, most of them deal with specific aspects of mobility (e.g. distribution, context, adaptation), providing a limited set of functionalities to applications, and, more importantly, making difficult a comprehensive understanding of the set of mobile middleware concerns. In such a context, based on a product line approach, this paper presents a requirement analysis for mobile middleware, gathering and detailing the most important mobility concerns that should be addressed, and consequently, enabling the customization of compliant platforms that can be derived from the set of elicited requirements.