Project overview
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The technologies of PDA, digital cellular
phone and smart card, when combined and integrated well, have the potential
of replacing all of the things people have to carry around with them by one
small device, the Mobile
Digital Companion. It is a small portable computer
and wireless communications device that can replace cash, cheque book,
passport, keys, diary, phone, pager, maps and possibly briefcases as well.
The combination of an intelligent information system and a location system
engenders many new types of applications, such as admission control, digital
chequebook, paging, and an automatic diary that keeps track of where you were
and with whom.
The design challenges lie primarily in
the creation of a single architecture that allows the integration of security
functions, externally offered services, personality, and communication. In
the Moby Dick architecture, Quality of Service (QoS) is no longer a
networking issue alone, but a framework to model integration and integrated
management of all the system services and applications in the Mobile Digital
Companion.
Currently, the main research themes of
Moby Dick are:
- Reconfigurable
computing
We claim that a reconfigurable systems architecture in combination with
a QoS driven operating system that can deal with the inherent dynamics
of a mobile system, is of fundamental importance to the success of
flexible low-power handheld systems. In the companion projects Chameleon and Gecko
we study the opportunities of reconfiguration of a mobile multimedia
system.
- Wireless sensor
networks
Sensors are tiny devices capable of capturing physical information, such
as heat, light or motion, about an environment. Embedding millions of
sensors into an environment creates a digital skin or wireless network
of sensors, each sensor capable of capturing physical information about
its immediate space. These massively distributed collaborative
sensor networks communicate with one another and captures the
immense amounts of low-level information to produce knowledge
representative of the overall environment. The EYES
project is a European IST project that deals with energy-efficient
sensor networks.
- Energy-efficient
wireless communication under QoS constraints
The energy efficiency of wireless communication for multimedia traffic
with Quality of Service constraints is another main issue in the Moby
Dick project. We have developed an energy-efficient MAC protocol E2MaC and data link layer that is able to meet both requirements.
Key to our approach is a high degree of adaptivity. At the transport
layer we have developed E2TCP. This protocol not only has a higher energy efficiency than
TCP/IP, but it also manages to outperform TCP/IP on more traditional
performance metrics: throughput and latency.
- Efficient architectures for seamless
services on heterogeneous wireless networks
The overall objective is to study, develop and validate heterogeneous
wireless network architectures, where the user is unbothered, but can
have full control, of the transport mechanisms and infrastructures used
to access and deliver the services requested, while the available
resources are used efficiently. Seamless
Services is a European research project investigating the
construction and use of future network information services for mobile
and non-mobile users. Our objective is to develop new innovative methods
and techniques for dynamic administration, representation, communication
and presentation of information and data - in order to enable seamless
access to networks services whatever access medium being used.
- System architecture for mobile
multimedia computers
The Companions must meet several major requirements: high performance,
energy efficient, a notion of Quality of Service (QoS), small size, and
low design complexity. The energy consumption due to the increasing
demand for performance and functionality will be the limiting factor for
its capabilities. The technology is used to decrease energy consumption
and to increase functionality to provide services such as multimedia
devices, compression and decompression, network access, and security
functions. The approach is based on dedicated functionality and the
extensive use of energy reduction techniques at all levels of system
design. The unconventional architecture saves energy by using system
decomposition at different levels of the architecture and exploits
locality of reference with application domain specific modules. A
reconfigurable internal communication network switch, called Octopus,
exploit locality of reference and eliminates wasteful data copies.
- Security
The objective is to find out whether we can provide a plausible and
integrated solution for implementing fully secure mechanisms in very
personal and relatively resource poor machines like the Mobile Digital
Companion.
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