Contact: Alaeddine Elfawal
Over the few last years, WIFI interfaces have been expanded dramatically. They come with many personnel devices such as laptops, PDAs, mobile phones, video games and even with peripheral and vehicles. WIFI starts to play an important role in the everyday life. It is very frequent to find people with more than WIFI interface, one in the mobile phone, another in the laptop, and may be a third in the vehicle. This expansion changes dramatically the ad-hoc network semantic.
This change in the ad-hoc environment opens the door to new applications and communication paradigms. Within this new ad-hoc environment that we call open-ended network, we are interested in “Spot” applications. As the name reveals, such applications aim at making a spot around the source. That is, the packets injected by the application are disseminated around the source through multi-hop broadcast scheme. The spot is the area where the packets are disseminated.
As a part of a European project called Haggle, we are developing a spot application on smartphones equipped with WIFI interfaces. Our application is a free alternative to costly cellular services. For confidentiality reasons, the application is not described here, as it is under patenting process. The development is in C++ for windows mobile and XP platforms. The aim of this project is to improve the prototype that is being developed.
Benefits: Working on a very hot topic which is the future of the communication between the wireless devices.
Requirements: Very good programming skills in C++.