A programming abstraction for motion-aware applications running on distributed systems of mobile components

Traditional distributed systems are intended to hide the system's distribution. Awareness of location within the system or the application is not necessary. In contrast, mobile distributed systems' applications often require awareness of location and even motion. In order to allow abstract generic programming that is unaware of the actual executing system, its distribution has to be hidden to the programmer. So, the need for a programming abstraction that allows considering distribution transparency within the executing system and motion awareness within the application becomes apparent. This would allow developing classes of applications used in different contexts and executed by numerous varying systems. Such a top-down view disburdens the programmer from the complex and error-prone application partitioning and assignment to the sub-systems. Hence, scalability and robustness are improved significantly. We claim that spatiotemporal constraints are a proper way to provide such a top-down approach. We introduce our approach for such constraints and give an application example.