MadApp: A Middleware for Opportunistic Data in Mobile Web Applications

Mobile computing increasingly often entails applications that embody opportunistic or delay-tolerant communication, and while much work has focused on refining and optimizing the technical underpinnings for providing delay-tolerant communication constructs, there is almost a complete lack of support for integrating opportunistic communication functionality at the application level. This paper introduces MadApp, an application-level development framework that provides tailored abstractions and support infrastructure for creating dynamic web pages that can incorporate received content from various opportunistic communication channels on-the-fly. We describe multiple application scenarios in which these constructs can seamlessly apply, and provide a complete conceptual and concrete architecture and implementation for MadApp. We evaluate MadApp´s support for opportunistic mobile computing web applications using two different mobility trace data sets collected from the real-world. This paper demonstrates that MadApp enables opportunistic mobile computing applications to begin to leverage the significant advances in delay-tolerant communication research, opening doors for even more dynamic and adaptive applications.