What is Software Architecture

Today's mobile handheld devices, such as smartphones and action cameras, are well equipped for a wide range of multimedia and context-aware tasks. Such tasks can leverage traditional services like streaming audio and video as well as newer services like sensor fusion. Ubiquitous network access, coupled with an increasingly sophisticated mixture of device-based hardware and software, is enabling context-aware applications at an unprecedented rate. The objective of this chapter is to discuss specific quality attributes with respect to device-side software architectures providing these multimedia and sensor capabilities. This chapter focuses specifically on device-side client architectures rather than network or server architectures. Specific domain requirements and quality attributes are first derived through a synthesis of current research and industry trends, and subsequently analyzed. The analysis reveals some qualitative results that seem unintuitive at first glance but that become more understandable when provided with rationale relative to the handheld domain context.