Frank Fitzek's Forum Nokia Blog

Nokia N95 robot - R2D2 here we come ...

fitzek — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:00:48 +0200

At Aalborg University we are doing a lot of measurements with mobile phones. We are especially interested to measure dynamic network behaviors. So far our measurements were static, but with our small robot above we have a lot of more possibility. Our main application field are "mobile WLAN measurements", "social mobile networks", "cooperative wireless networks", "network coding", ...So far we have only one robot, but we plan to have a large number of those in the future.

The robot consists out of the mobility pack (wheels, gear, etc), a controller for the mobility and the N95 (any device can be used here). The controller is our opensensor that is composed out of a microcontroller and some wireless air interfaces (opensensor).

The idea is that the mobile phones is helping to find the right position by using GPS (outdor) or the camera (indoor). After the right position is found, the measurement campaigns start.

In case somebody out there is interested in the robot, we make the material available.

I love the new iPhone : Twice as fast - Half the battery

fitzek — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:54:25 +0300

Even though I do not have any iPhone, I am reading all the news and discussions in the forums about this new toy. I am not into all the nice features, I am more looking into the battery issues. There are a lot of helpful advises how you can save energy on the new iPhone. Here I list some of them

- Do turn off WLAN

- Do turn off Bluetooth

- Reduce the brightness of the display

- Do not check too often your email

- Switch of 3G and use 2G instead (so why was there a 3G iPhone at all?, yes the GPS stuff!)

and here my personal advise

- Do not switch it on at all (operational time -> infinity).

Even though I have to admit that battery issues are not limited to the iPhone, I am quite happy to read all about it and use it for my students to explain why we need to work on energy saving strategies at all. As my research area is on energy saving mechanisms, the iPhone is a very good example. Steve Jobs made a very clever statement referring to the 3G chipset as power hogs. At that time he used this as an excuse why there is no 3G chipset on the devices. If you look at http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.htm, you can see that APPLE states, that the talk time for 2G is twice as high as for 3G. The GPS chipset is switched off automatically if not needed, but the 3G can only switched off manually.Therefore I changed the slogan of Apple "Twice as fast - Half the price" to "Twice as fast - Half the battery"

So whatever the 4G technology will be, as you should rarely use 3G, 4G you should never use if you care about battery. So long, I need to read more about it, very good motivation for my daily work.

Cooperative Mobile Networks @ Forum Nokia Innovation Seminar

fitzek — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:33:38 +0300

At 26th of May Forum Nokia holds an innovation Seminar in Barcelona.

https://mktools.forum.nokia.com/invitation/fngoesbarcelona

I will be talk about cooperative mobile networks and by this blog I would like to raise your attention to this topic.

The mobile world we are living in is more or less centralized due to the cellular network structure. Whatever mobile device you have, they seems to be obsessed by the idea to be connected to an "overlay" network such as 2G/3G, WLAN, or WiMAX. But this kind of architecture is limiting the mobile networking.

The real power lies in the cooperation among mobile devices - thus the future networks are formed by us users. Those formation are sometimes referred to as wireless grids and within those grids resources such as energy, sensors, memory, or wireless bandwidth can be shared such that a grid entity will offer better performan than stand alone devices.

For those of you being interested into the topic I will open up a discussion board and may we will see us in Barcelona.

opensensor

fitzek — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:57:50 +0200

For those of you being interested in external sensors for mobile phones, please check out the opensensor activity. The opensensor platform offers:

open hardware design
open software
open educational material (PowerPoint and pdf)

There are already some sensor platforms on the market.Nevertheless, we have decided to design our own platform. The main reason was to have as much flexibility on the platforms possible. Flexibility refers to the number of connectable sensor parts as well as the wireless part. As the opensensor should be used for ongoing and future research project as well as for teaching purposes, the design of the board was kept as simple as possible. Throughout the evolution of the opensensor, we decided to skip the SMD technology and base the board on standard components that everybody can solder the opensensor without any special equipment. Based on standard components, the opensensor board is coming at a very low cost, which should enable a lot of researchers to implement their ideas in the field of wireless sensor networking on a real platform. As the mobile device group of AAU has a huge interest in the convergences of wireless sensors with mobile phones, the opensensor offers the possibility to communicate with commercial mobile phone. As most 3rd party solutions for wireless networking are closed solutions, we decided to make the whole opensensor concept freely available for everybody. Not just open source, but also open hardware and open teaching material. We hope to inspire other researchers to use our platform and eventually contribute to the project with more software or teaching material.

http://mobiledevices.kom.aau.dk/opensensor

Mobile Developer Days - PostCard

fitzek — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:43:25 +0200

MDD Post Card

click here