Out in the woods,
or in the city;
Its all the same to me-
when I'm drivin' free,
the world's my home;
when I'm mobile!
Pete Townshend, The Who, "Goin' Mobile"
The mobile workforce is growing rapidly. As corporations expand, merge and split, it is often preferable to bring work to workers via telecommuting than vice-versa. This ever-increasing capability for mobile communications has resulted in new job categories, such as mobile professionals, who are defined as professionals spending 20% or more of their time away from their primary work locations. There are also a very large number of jobs that have always been mobile, such as sales, which are now able to enjoy communications capability essentially everywhere.
The capabilities, size and cost of mobile computing devices continue to improve, encouraging further growth in the number of mobile workers. These mobile computing devices include modems, notebook computers, personal intelligent communicators, personal digital assistants, palmtop units, organizers, and information managers. However, the inherent limitations of mobile computing devices (e.g., size, computing power, energy usage) have thus far limited the scope of early mobile applications to those which are time-sensitive.
It is beneficial for mobile applications to be divisible into a part which travels with the mobile user and a part which remains in place. The part of the application which travels with the user is generally referred to as the client and the stationary part is generally referred to as the server. The client-server architecture is well-defined and, if followed, allows many applications to work as well for a mobile user as for a LAN user.
In this chapter, we discuss some of the more common mobile applications and the services they require from the network. Several specific value-added services provided in CDPD, such as limited size messaging and the subscriber location service are also presented.