Kartik Muralidharan

BOWL: Design and implementation of a (connectionless) broadcasting system over wireless LAN

A truly pervasive computing environment can only be created if ubiquitous computation power can collaborate seamlessly to create superior user experience. With the adoption of mobile computing platforms on the rise, we have explored how the IEEE 802.11 wireless access standards can be used to enable a device to be more aware of the capabilities of the infrastructure in its surroundings. Specifically, we have been able to effectively transfer information to these WiFi enabled devices without explicit connections being established and therefore our solution is proven to be much more scalable. We have also showcased a pilot application using the broadcast over wireless LAN (BOWL) technology.

Mobile platform and application research at SMU LiveLabs

LiveLabs is an urban scale research testbed in Singapore. It is currently in the process of design, implementation and deployment at real-life urban spaces like a sprawling university campus, a shopping mall, an airport and an amusement park; where real smartphone users are being incentivized to participate in large scale consumer behavioral trials and experiments. The scale of the testbed needs careful research on multiple aspects of mobile computing - including smart application and UI design, smartphone power management, handling user privacy and so on. In this demonstration paper, we outline some important aspects of ongoing research, for handling some key technical challenges of a real city-scale smartphone testbed.

mConnect: A context aware mobile transaction middleware

Enterprises are aggressively eyeing ubiquitous mobile solutions to increase the efficiency of their taskforce, but this exercise is hindered by several functional and technical challenges. For instance mobile devices are widely different in terms of their underlying platform capabilities, available screen real estate, input mechanisms and so on. In this work we introduce mConnect, a Context aware real time Mobile Transaction Middleware which manages this device diversity in an efficient manner. mConnect abstracts the complexities of the mobile world from the existing infrastructure and seamlessly helps in extending/ creating internet based transaction solutions for mobile users with minimal or no modification to the back-end. This in turn accelerates the adoption of the mobile device as a default channel to access the Web.