Optimizing Mobile Application Communication for Challenged Network Environments

Designing mobile applications for challenged network environments necessitates new abstractions that target deployment architects, non-developers who are charged with adapting an ensemble of off-the-shelf software to a deployment context. Data transfer is integral to mobile application design and deployments have inherent and contextual requirements that determine what data should be transferred and when. In this paper, we investigate building mobile applications in challenged network environments by focusing on abstractions to support disconnected environments and areas of sparse heterogeneous connectivity. We explore and characterize various methods of transmitting data using: existing synchronization tools, peer-to-peer communication, and sparse networks. We also introduce a new software tool called ODK Submit to help streamline application customization to challenged network environments.