Mobile computing: Opportunities for optimization research

The last 20 years have seen a tremendous growth in mobile computing and wireless communications and services. Most of the research in mobile computing has addressed the fundamental engineering issues involved in building and exploiting mobile and wireless systems, ranging from cellular, to satellite, to ad hoc and, more recently, to sensor networks. On the other hand, optimization research in mobile computing and wireless communications has received, in relative terms, less attention and was related mostly to optimizing the performance of individual communication protocols. Supporting mobility in all its aspects from cellular services to multimedia brings to the fore new problems and opportunities for optimization research. This paper is a survey of some of the promising areas in which optimization can be used to solve mobile computing problems.