Integrating Mobile Computing and Cloud-Based Enterprise Information Systems

Abstract

Enterprise mobile applications are routinely used in settings, warehouses, client sites, vehicles in transit, where network connectivity is intermittent rather than continuous, yet the cloud-based enterprise information systems those applications must integrate with are typically designed around an assumption of reliable, low-latency connectivity. This paper proposes TIDE, a Tolerant, Incremental, Delta-based, Eventually-consistent framework for integrating mobile computing with cloud-based enterprise information systems, synthesizing the classical disconnected-operation and weakly connected replication literature with contemporary conflict-free replication and mobile-cloud offloading research and cloud-native architectural principles. TIDE treats a mobile client's connectivity state- synced, queuing offline, reconnecting, and merging, as a first-class part of the integration architecture rather than an edge case the backend is unaware of, recording every local write as a delta against a last-known-synced baseline and reconciling queued deltas through a conflict-resolution policy chosen per data type rather than applied uniformly. The architecture is through a connectivity-state diagram showing a disguised enterprise field-service scenario, a comparative table contrasting TIDE-guided integration against an always-online design and a naive full-resync design, and an case scenario tracing a field technician's offline work session through reconnection and merge. All quantitative figures are explicitly labeled as estimates constructed to demonstrate the framework rather than measurements from a production deployment. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limits of delta-based reconciliation and directions for empirical validation.