Mobile Radio Ethernet, Beacons, PCMCIA,
Mobile IP, PDA Search,
Milestones.
Following is some stuff that I will be working on for the spring
quarter. The goal of all this hacking it to build an infrastructure
for mobile computing.
For the spring quarter I will be working on an architecture that
combines both location-independent wireless communication with
location beacons.
The goal is to construct an in-building wireless network with coverage
for most of the building. At the momemt I am negotiating a
non-disclosure agreement for next generation radio based ethernet
hardware and driver source code. Most of my time will be spent on
building a device driver for Mach.
Progress Report.
In coordination with Xerox PARC Dr. Borriello's hardware design
group designed a low cost, location transmitting, beacon IR device.
Once the beacons are fabricated and shipped we will deploy the beacons
throughout the Computer Science and Engineering building. The beacons
will transmit a location ID that our mobile application use to
determine the users' current position. With the beacons we are
investigating mobile applications that require
location dependent information, thus are fundamentally different of
location independent applications. By integrating high bandwidth
wireless location independent communication with cheap, low
speed location specifiers we can build variable size location
cells.
For mobile units this seems to be the form factor of choice. I am
coordinating the development and release of a generic device driver
with a bunch of people in the LINUX laptops community. A working
prototype exists for LINUX and it should be straight forward to port
it to MACH. The goal is to distribute the burden of developing and
testing the driver with as many people as possible, only requiring a
port of a tested PCMCIA driver to MACH.
Progress Report.
Install mobile-ip routers under MACH. Will need to write the required
low-level code to enable the hand-off between the wireless ethernet
basestations.
Progress Report.
Searching for a PDA using a 32-bit dominant processor family (say
80x86 with x>=3) with PCMCIA slots and pen input. Something to
consider are future PDAs based on the Intel Polar chipset.
Searching for a PDA OS platform with low-level development
environment (i.e., don't need OS source code for everything,
but should be able to add new devices, protocols, etc. ...).
Something to consider is WinPAD, MACH, LINUX, GEOS. Only
MACH is processor independent.
Potential work here is to port a OS to the PDA, giving us
complete control... possibly pursuing some of the ideas
mentioned in the WWOS IV papers. Could use MACH? Mobile
SPIN?
beacon database with RPC interface (server). Progress Report.
device driver for beacons. Progress
Report.
generic client for beacon location information. Progress
Report.
generic PCMCIA device driver. Progress
Report.
mobile ip router under MACH; support for hand-off between base
stations. Progress Report.
device driver for Proxim RangeLAN2 ISA. Progress Report.
pcmcia mapping of RangeLAN2 card (6/1/94). Progress Report.
Marc E. Fiuczynski
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