CAREER: Towards an Efficient Ubiquitous Computing Infrastructure

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In 1989, the researcher applied for graduate schooland wrote that global network access would change the way people work and that people would use the network to "plan travel, pay bills and access libraries of information". A decade later, the Internet and Web applications made these network applications a reality. As we look to the future, the next major evolution in technology will be to make it possible for users to access information and interact with all devices in their environment through ubiquitous wireless networks and simple inexpensive computing devices such as PDAs [81]. The popular approach to achieving this future vision has been to move the applications and network services available on the Internet onto the simple mobile devices and the wireless network infrastructure. However, innovative network services and protocols will be necessary to operate such networks and applications efficiently. The objective of this NSF CAREER proposal is to examine the services that this new generation of mobile applications need from the network and to carefully adapt the design and implementation of these services to the environment's demands. The unique requirements of this environment include: Power Awareness. Most mobile devices will be battery operated and thus require energy efficiency. Wireless Link Characteristics. Wireless links are slower due to limited spectrum availability, are prone to loss and disconnection, and are often connection-oriented or stateful. Network Evolution. Since users will not upgrade all their small devices simultaneously, the future system must support automatic upgrading, multiple simultaneous versions and/or backward compatibility. Dynamic Network. The members of a network are dynamic due to mobility and range of network. Isolation. A group of wireless devices should be able to operate in isolation from any infrastructure. Simple Devices. Many of the devices that participate in such a network may be extremely simple. Scale of Operation. The future network will have billions of small devices. New Applications. Applications in this environment may need very different services from the network. The objective of this CAREER proposal is to design a new networking and operating system infrastructure for this next generation of ubiquitous computing applications. The research plan consists of three major stages. In the first stage, the researcher plans to build some of these next generation applications to improve the understanding of their requirements. The next stage consists of developing protocols and operating system services based on these new requirements. The project is especially interested in 1) improving the bandwidth and power efficiency of network protocols, 2) making it possible for applications and protocols to adapt to the availability of power, availability of bandwidth and other environmental conditions, 3) designing service discovery approaches that can handle the query types that are likely for mobile applications, and 4) making this environment support the easy introduction of new link technologies, network protocols and applications. Finally, the research will be evaluated by modifying our test applications to use these new services. If successful, this project will significantly change how wireless networks and mobile applications of the future will be structured and built. The education plan proposes to use educational applications such as shared note taking [24] and intelligent classrooms [1] among the early target applications to be used. In addition, the researcher plans to incorporate mobile and wireless education into the already existing mainstream undergraduate and graduate networking classes.