Mr. Helgesen

Assignment

1 a) Stationary context aware application
Security surveillance:
Many cities have night time crime and antisocial behaviour problems, such as drunkenness, fights, vandalism and general crime. These cities have cameras installed, but they record all happenings without any actions. With a context aware application here, the cameras should detect unusual events, such as patterns of running people, converging people or stationary people, and then alert human security staff.

1 b) Mobile context aware application
Some armed forces in Norway use a GSM/GPS-device in their backpack which sends their location at any given time via SMS to a mobile phone. This means that officers who are stationed at headquarters may send an SMS to a single soldier (or all) and instantly get a respond with their location, time elapsed since last send and so on.

1 c) Imaginary mobile context aware “killer” application
An ordering and payment system for mobile phones. A customer is ordering from a web shop via his cell phone and plots in his VISA-number to verify the order. The security would also be good, because the phone can recognize its user via eye-ray or fingerprint. Regular VISA-cards use a PIN-code which anyone can steal and abuse.

2 a)

First generation
Mobile phones began to proliferate through the 1980s with the introduction of “cellular” phones based on cellular networks with multiple base stations located relatively close to each other, and protocols for the automated “handover” between two cells when a phone moved from one cell to the other. At this time analog transmission was in use in all systems. Mobile phones were somewhat larger than current ones, and at first, all were designed for permanent installation in cars (hence the term car phone). In Switzerland, the name for the big car-based phone models was “Nationales Autotelefon”, and the abbreviation of it (“Natel”) persists as the common designation for mobile phones. Soon, some of these bulky units were converted for use as “transportable” phones the size of a briefcase. Motorola introduced the first truly portable, hand held phone. These systems (NMT, AMPS, TACS, RTMI, C-Netz, and Radiocom 2000) later became known as first generation (1G) mobile phones.
In September 1981 the first cell phone network with automatic roaming was started in Saudi Arabia; it was an NMT system. One month later the Nordic countries started an NMT network with automatic roaming between countries.
Second Generation
In the 1990s, second generation (2G) mobile phone systems such as GSM, IS-136 (“TDMA”), iDEN and IS-95 (“CDMA”) began to be introduced. The first digital cellular phone call was made in the United States in 1990, in 1991 the first GSM network opened in Europe. 2G phone systems were characterised by digital circuit switched transmission and the introduction of advanced and fast phone to network signalling. In general the frequencies used by 2G systems in Europe were higher though with some overlap, for example the 900 MHz frequency range was used for both 1G and 2G systems in Europe and so such 1G systems were rapidly closed down to make space for 2G systems. In America the IS-54 standard was deployed in the same band as AMPS and displaced some of the existing analog channels.
Coinciding with the introduction of 2G systems were trends which meant that the larger “bricks” disappeared and tiny 100–200g hand-held devices became the norm. These trends included technology improvements such as better battery technologies and lower power electronics, but also are largely related to the higher density of cellular sites caused by increasing usage levels.
Third Generation
Not long after the introduction of 2G networks, projects began to develop 3G systems. Inevitably there were many different standards with different contenders pushing their own technologies. Quite differently from 2G systems, however, the meaning of 3G has been standardised in the IMT-2000 standardisation process. This process did not standardise on a technology, but rather on a set of requirements (2 Mbit/s maximum data rate indoors, 384 kbit/s outdoors, for example). At that point, the vision of a single unified worldwide standard broke down and several different standards have been introduced.
During the development of 3G systems, 2.5G systems such as CDMA2000 1x and GPRS were developed as extensions to existing 2G networks. These provide some of the features of 3G without fulfilling the promised high data rates or full range of multimedia services. For example, CDMA2000-1X delivers theoretical maximum data speeds of up to 307 kbit/s. Just beyond these is the EDGE system which in theory covers the requirements for a 3G system, but is so narrowly above these that any practical system would be sure to fall short.
At the beginning of the 21st century, 3G mobile phone systems such as UMTS and CDMA2000 1xEV-DO have now begun to be publicly available. The final success of these systems is still to be determined.
Live streaming of radio and television to 3G handsets is one future direction for the industry, with companies from RealPlayer and Disney recently announcing services.
2 b)
My prediction in mobile phone usage the next five years, will be that 3G will expand enormously and be default on every phone. General for mobiles, I believe that vehicles, buildings and planes will automatically be connected via mobiles and that some “killer” Bluetooth will be the backbone of this. Mobiles will also be used more in domestic homes to control garage doors, washing machines, TVs and radios. I’m really excited to how it will develop!

3
a) Most useful: http://maps.google.com/
Plot in destination for anything and get the directions.

b) Most impressive: http://earth.google.com/
Download a program and visit the whole world by satellite.

c) Most original: http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/
Covers over 2000 pubs in London with Google Maps.

d) Best commercial potential: http://www2.xfiles.hotels-x.net
Get maps which show hotels from your search.

e) Least useful: http://flickr.com/photos/mathowie/8496262/
A guy shows his neighbourhood where he grew up.

f) Most stupid: http://grad.icmc.usp.br/~cipriani/bighole.php?lang=en
Dig a whole in the map and see where you end up. Hooray!

What will the project contain?

We will try to allow commodity hardware clients like notebooks, PDAs and cell phones to locate themselves by listening for radio beacons such as 802.11 access points, GSM cell phone towers, and fixed Bluetooth devices that already exist in large numbers around us in the environment. These beacons all have unique or semi-unique IDs, for example, a MAC address. Clients compute their own location by hearing one or more IDs, looking up the associated beacons’ positions in a locally cached map, and estimating their own position referenced to the beacons’ positions.

Project has been assigned

This morning I chose a project which was proposed by Espen Talberg. We are going to use different platforms like mobile phones, laptops etc. to reveal the differences between GPS and GMS in our region. We will be using existing software programs and most likey modify these to fit our project.

More info will come as soon as we have a firmer grip about our project and goal

Guten Tag, Welt!

Not that I’m German, but since the default topic were in English I just had to be “funny”. Anywho, let’s get over to the important thing; me.

I am studying Information Technology at Østfold University College. This College is located in Halden, Norway – about 2 hours south east of Oslo.

This blog will be updated with information about my project in the course “Stedbaserte Systemer” (GPS, digital maps etc.). So stay tuned for some good ‘ol blog action!