Building reliable mobile applications with space-elastic adaptation

Abstract

Mobile applications, for example mobile robots, are playing an increasingly important role in our everyday lives. Since components of these applications share their environment with each other and with humans, they need to coordinate their behavior to respect strong safety constraints. Unfortunately, they typically make use of wireless networks in which real-time communication is highly unreliable, making coordination particularly challenging. We present a real-time communication model for wireless networks that takes into account that communication might not be reliable. It provides feedback to mobile components about the state of communication, so that they can adapt their behavior accordingly. We show how this model can be used to build reliable mobile applications in wireless networks: this involves specifying the safety constraints that need to be respected, and translating them into constraints on the behavior of individual components. To illustrate our approach, we describe an example from the intelligent transportation systems domain.