Opportunistic Annexing for Handheld Devices: Opportunities and Challenges
Jeffrey S. Pierce, Heather Elizabeth Mahaney, Gregory D. Abowd · 2003
Handheld devices, whether personal digital assistants (PDAs), cellphones, or something else, currently have limited processing, storage, input, and output capabilities. The first two, processing and storage, should continue to improve as advances in semiconductor technologies bring us faster and smaller chips. The built-in input and output (I/O) capabilities are less likely to improve because handhelds must remain small enough to easily slip into a pocket. Improving the I/O capabilities of handhelds is an important research challenge. Most of the current research in this area focuses on making better use of handhelds existing I/O capabilities. A much less common approach is to explore how handhelds can make use of additional devices. We believe that the increasing density of I/O devices we encounter in our daily lives presents an opportunity to improve the I/O capabilities of handhelds through opportunistic annexing. Opportunistic annexing is the process of temporarily attaching devices to a computational environment (consisting of one or more devices such as a laptop, PDA, cellphone, etc.) to enhance its capabilities. Increasing an environments processing power and storage