A Taxonomy of Mobile and Pervasive Applications

In this paper we present a taxonomy for characterizing pervasive applications. This taxonomy focuses on abstracting application characteristics. independent of the characteristics of the middleware or infrastructure that support the application, and provides a controlled vocabulary for thinking about the application. We provide an informal verification for the taxonomy by using it to categorize a range of pervasive applications, culled from the literature and from projects we are involved in, and showing that the taxonomy is (a) consistent and complet - similar applications are categorized similarly and applications that are different are not similarly categorized and (b) useful - each characteristic provides new information about applications not explained by the other characteristics. Finally, we present concrete uses for the taxonomy.