An Infopad Basestation Interface using ANSI/IEEE 488.1-1987

Roy Allen Sutton

 M.S. 1998 (advisor: Jan Rabaey)

The fields of mobile computing and wireless networking are rapidly merging to form new classes of computing systems. Increased integrated circuit density is driving developments in mobile computing and providing more elaborate human inter-faces in smaller system packages. This coupled with emerging protocol standards and techniques for integrating heterogeneous networks, with improved bandwidth management, provide a platform for new applications. Un-tethered access to shared data sets, information exchange amongst mobile users, real-time interaction over large-areas, are just a few of the types of services now possible. Anytime, anywhere access is an emerging reality. Although much of the hardware infrastructure is in place, work remains in the integration of these complex meta-systems. Many low-level issues still require optimization; such as efficient use of power, improved computation efficiency, more natural interfaces, and ergonomic designs. However, it is the higher level integration which remains largely immature. Who controls adaptation to changes in the environment? Where does the computation occur when an application can utilize both local and remote resources? How do we handle process migration across network boundaries? How do we handle connection management? How does this change when the networks are dissimilar? These are just a few of the unresolved issues.