Derek Woods

An evaluation of indoor location determination technologies

The development of real-time locating systems (RTLS) has become an important add-on to many existing location aware systems. While GPS has solved most of the outdoor RTLS problems, it fails to repeat this success indoors. A number of technologies have been used to address the indoor tracking problem. The ability to accurately track the location of people indoors has many applications ranging from medical, military and logistical to entertainment. However, current systems cannot provide continuous real-time tracking of a moving target or lose capability when coverage is poor. The deployment of a real-time location determination system however is fraught with problems. To date there has been little research into comparing commercial systems on the market with regard to informing IT departments as to their performance in various aspects which are important to tracking devices and people in relatively confined areas. This article attempts to provide such a useful comparison by providing a review of the practicalities of installing certain location-sensing systems. We also comment on the accuracies achieved and problems encountered using the position-sensing systems.

Investigating text input methods for mobile phones

Human Computer Interaction is a primary factor in the success or failure of any device but if an objective view is taken of the current mobile phone market you would be forgiven for thinking usability was secondary to aesthetics. Many phone manufacturers modify the design of phones to be different than the competition and to target fashion trends, usually at the expense of usability and performance. There is a lack of awareness among many buyers of the usability of the device they are purchasing and the disposability of modern technology is an effect rather than a cause of this. Designing new text entry methods for mobile devices can be expensive and labour-intensive. The assessment and comparison of a new text entry method with current methods is a necessary part of the design process. The best way to do this is through an empirical evaluation. The aim of the paper is to establish which mobile phone text input method best suits the requirements of a select group of target users. This study used a diverse range of users to compare devices that are in everyday use by most of the adult population. The proliferation of the devices is as yet unmatched by the study of their application and the consideration of their user friendliness.

Mobile development environments for electronic finance

Recent trends in e-finance have shown that mobile technology is growing and with this comes new opportunities for deploying new services for customers. Development of systems on mobile devices can require a lot more resources in the form of development time. There is a lack of documentation as to the merits of leading development environments for mobile platforms. The objective here is to compare the implementation process of developing on each mobile device. We set about investigating the various properties through building an e-finance application on each platform and we offer recommendations for e-finance mobile developers as to which is most suitable.

The effects of badly behaved routers on Internet congestion

From an exhaustive series of trace packets to a diverse set of destinations, our research has discovered that specific routers are the cause of bottlenecks in the Internet. We found that packets took the same route each time towards their destination. Our research has also found that over periods as large as seven days these routers continue to cause bottlenecks with no re-routing of packets to alleviate congestion. This research begs the question as to why these bottlenecks occur at the same places and for so long a period and also queries the extent of implementation of dynamic routing algorithms.