Rapid development in the field of information technology (IT) has created affordable personal computing options today-options that weren't affordable (costing millions of dollars) a few decades ago. Such rapid development has continued to the point where the greatest inventions go beyond our traditional notions of personal computing. The significant aspect of pervasive computing and smart spaces is that they enable the users with personalized service and ubiquity in computation. The focus is now on researching pervasive computing devices, which spreads across personal digital assistants (PDA) to the unseen electronics in our cars, computer appliances and telephones. Currently, the pervasive computing research is hindered by issues such as secure user identification and secure user mobility support for services.

Keeping this in mind, researchers from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is focused on distributed multimedia systems research. In particular, the research group is focused on enabling an infrastructure that can support mutual authentication between the user and the computing device, and also provide seamless support of computation and service as the user moves from one location to other. Further, the researchers are working toward delivering a location-aware solution so as to automatically disclose computing devices and service providers in the vicinity of the user.

To address the above-mentioned issues, the researchers have designed and deployed an innovative security badge-activated application-level handoff protocol known as the mobile ID protocol, which enables user mobility support for multimedia streaming applications. The unique aspect of this innovative protocol is that it has a location-aware system, which identifies user movement on the client side. Further, it has a mobility database to store all the interrupted sessions on the server side, and a mobile ID client/server pair, which organizes the events on either side working closely with the location-aware system, mobility database, and video client/server pair to accomplish the user-oriented streaming application. The user is certified using AirID security badges and the protocol is carried out at the application level.

The research team headed by Professor Klara Nahrstedt has also designed an architecture to affirm user identification and user mobility with the help of heterogeneous wireless handheld systems. This particular architecture scores over the traditional ones as it is very stable/secure, scalable, quality of service (QoS)-aware and is applicable as a layered protocol stack. Further, the innovative wireless handheld device has the capability to store the state of the service/computation, which is used for mobility support. By varying the level of security, the performance of the device goes up, which in turn takes care of the QoS.

Further, this novel solution includes a location system that automatically detects novel computing devices based on the user location. Such an innovative architecture is applicable for any system/application demanding seamless mobility support. The research group has recently demonstrated the results of this innovative design for a video-on-demand application, wherein the user hopes to have consistent mobility support for viewing a video as the user moves from one location to another.

Details:

Dr. Klara Nahrstedt

Professor

3111 Digital Computer Laboratory, 1304 West Springfield Avenue,

University of Illinois,

Urbana, IL 61801.

Phone: 217-244-6624

Fax: 217-333-3501

E-mail: klara@cs.uiuc.edu

URL: www.cs.uiuc.edu

To comment on this article, write to us at tiresearch@frost.com

To find out more about Technical Insights and our Alerts, subscriptions and research services, access http://ti.frost.com