Over-the-air deployment of applications in multi-platform environments

Abstract

Over-the-air (OTA) delivery of applications is important to support as it enables easy deployment and upgrades to applications, thereby reducing the disrupting effect which installations may have on mobile users. The mobile environment is highly heterogeneous, hence OTA servers must be able to deliver customised applications and also adapt their delivery mechanism to various protocols. This paper outlines our experience in designing an adaptive platform to enable heterogeneous OTA delivery. We have utilised the 3DMA architecture which includes features such as changing interactions, disconnection support and dynamic delivery of applications. We have extended previous work on this architecture by using it for implementing an adaptable Web server to support OTA over HTTP. A simple case study found that by allowing JIT packaging of data and behaviour, delivery of both content and behaviour can be tailored to the current context. This eliminates the need for pre-packaged deployment solutions that are difficult to employ in environments with dynamic variations in resources and context.