R&D challenges and solutions for mobile cyber-physical applications and supporting Internet services

The powerful processors and variety of sensors in new and planned mobile Internet devices, such as Apple’s iPhone and Android-based smartphones, can be leveraged to build cyber-physical applications that collect sensor data from the real world and communicate it back to Internet services for processing and aggregation. This article presents key R&D challenges facing developers of mobile cyber-physical applications that integrate with Internet services and summarizes emerging solutions to address these challenges. For example, application software should be architected to conserve power, which motivates R&D on tools that can predict the power consumption characteristics of mobile software architectures. Other R&D challenges involve the relative paucity of work on software and sensor data collection architectures that cater to the powerful capabilities and cyber-physical aspects of mobile Internet devices, which motivates R&D on architectures tailored to the latest mobile Internet devices.