OMA DM‐based remote software fault management for mobile devices

Mobile devices (e.g. mobile handsets or PDAs) have gained much functionality and intelligence with the growth of mobile network technologies and the increased use of mobile services. As a consequence, mobile devices have become more complex and many related problems have occurred. Specifically, sudden rebooting and freezing problems caused by software faults decrease the availability of the mobile device and cause inconvenience to end‐users. To solve such problems, academia and industry have focused on Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Device Management (DM); this method is the international de facto standard for mobile device management. In this paper, we propose a software fault management method to remotely determine and correct problems of mobile devices based on OMA DM. We present a definition of management objects and a method to collect them from mobile devices using the OMA DM protocol. We also present a method for debugging and correcting software faults using the collected information. Finally, we present a prototype implementation and performance evaluation to validate our proposed method. Results of the performance evaluation show that our proposed method is efficient and scalable in regard to network traffic overhead and response time. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.