An application-aware mobility solution for the intelligent management of applications and resources

This dissertation has been motivated by the current high relevance of mobile communications, their high degree of penetration in many economic sectors and the still unresolved limitations associated to this area, such as the limitations of mobile devices, wireless networks and mobility.; The scientific community is currently studying possible solutions to these drawbacks but very few have considered as a solution the unification of the two major areas dealt within this dissertation: support for mobile applications and resource management for mobile devices. This unification enables the growth of the most specific and complex mobile services provided for this kind of environments. In this work, a mobile solution is proposed which manages intelligently these limitations and the ones associated to the mobile applications supported by it.; Its main novelty is the use of both the application needs and the status of resources to obtain a more optimal management of applications and resources. For that, a support model for mobile applications together with an XML-based language to represent the needs of applications has been defined. A special emphasis has been paid to the management of two particular resources: communications and energy, defining several techniques at the middleware level which optimise the usage of such resources. On the other hand, it is worth noting the definition of a new methodology to mobilize applications oriented both to the design of new applications and to the mobilization of already existing ones.; All the advantages mentioned above have been tested experimentally, by means of a set of scenarios and a measurement platform defined in an explicit manner for environments so limited as a PDA, proving that it is possible to obtain a more optimal management of applications and resources still finding a balance between their needs and resource limitations.