Supporting Collaboration in Mobile Environments

Continued rapid improvements in the hardware capabilities of mobile computing devices is driving a parallel need for a paradigm shift in software design for such devices with the aim of ushering in new classes of software applications for devices of the future. One such class of software application is collaborative applications that seem to reduce the burden and overhead of collaborations on human users by providing automated computational support for the more mundane and mechanical aspects of a cooperative effort. This dissertation addresses the research and software engineering questions associated with building a workflow-based collaboration system that can operate across mobile ad hoc networks, the most dynamic type of mobile networks that can function without dependence on any fixed external resources. While workflow management systems have been implemented for stable wired networks, the transition to a mobile network required the development of a knowledge management system for improving the predictability of the network topology, a mobility-aware specification language to specify workflows, and its accompanying algorithms that help automate key pieces of the software. In addition to details of the formulation, design, and implementation of the various algorithms and software components. this dissertation also describes the construction of a custom mobile workflow simulator that can be used to conduct simulation experiments that verify the effectiveness of the approaches presented in this document and beyond. Also presented are empirical results obtained using this simulator that show the effectiveness of the described approaches