Current Research Topics in Mobile Computing. Nokia. About 100 new phone models in 2003 globally. New challenges: Open platforms and SWarchitectures

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1 Current Research Topics in Mobile Computing EmSys Summer School 2003 Salzburg Nokia Trends in Mobile Computing Software Engineering Current Research Topics in Mobile Computing 1 NOKIA Cape.PPT/ /Nurminen Nokia About 100 new phone models in 2003 globally About 150 million phones sold annually Lot s of embedded systems products New challenges: Open platforms and SWarchitectures 2 NOKIA Cape.PPT/ /Nurminen

2 Trends in Mobile Computing Phones get more complex: 8 MB -> 16 MB > 32 MB Wireless access proliferates: GSM, GPRS, 3G, BT, WLAN Convergence in digital content: Voice, Audio, Images, Music, Multimedia Video, messaging Transactions, Gaming: Average 300 message size (KB) 50 Data traffic (MB/user/month) 25 1 desktop wireless Communication/Computation 1/1 2/1 Total cost of ownership in 2003: 3 NOKIA Cape.PPT/ /Nurminen Trends in Mobile Computing New data available in the terminal: Location, Presence An avalanche of new features, but small UI remains a bottleneck Unlicensed bands for proximity (BT, WLAN) => Peerto-peer applications Mobile computing follows the architetcures applications and services of fixed internet Are we done with Moore s Law? No, but demand starts to sift to new directions away form the standard PC microprocessor. 4 NOKIA Cape.PPT/ /Nurminen

3 Reflections on Software Engineering Fred Brooks: No silver bullet in Software Engineering. Programming productivity increases slowly, but steadily because of the increase in the abstraction level (Bell Labs): On average: 10 LoC's /person/day (An empirical law?) The number of machine instructions generated from LoC of HLL has increased by an order of magnitude in every 20 years. Lot s of code is redundant. 5 NOKIA Cape.PPT/ /Nurminen Reflections on Software Engineering This is a horizontal and global industry: In order to be competitive you have focus to your own core, and leave everything else for others to innovate. Open interfaces, layers, platforms, architectures and standards. Components and middleware. A lot of integration problems and business. Only in very exceptional cases you can live in isolation. For each generic software there is only one (global) market => you have to adopt to it and to it s main architecture(s). 6 NOKIA Cape.PPT/ /Nurminen

4 Software Architecture in Mobile Computing Basic problem: Continuous change of requirements. SW-architecture gives a framework for the requirements and supports the innovations with design constraints. What is the best architecture? The one that can best anticipate the unknown! Requirements live and evolve in close feedback with the software system and its architecture. Close feedback from the user all the way to the lowest platform level is needed in order to keep the whole SW-stack competitive. 7 NOKIA Cape.PPT/ /Nurminen Incremental, iterative development We humans are week in faith. We must see in order to trust. => Incremental, feature-at-the-time, development, like Extreme programming, XP. How to keep source code and the SW design consistent? Keep them inherently together. If you can t do fully automated MDD or MDA, establish a reverse engineering process to check the consistency. Model based automatic code generation works for specific areas, like protocols and for prototyping purposes. Open Source is important. 8 NOKIA Cape.PPT/ /Nurminen

5 Verification Good progress in mature areas like protocols. Should be tried out in new areas like API s and UIsoftware. Basic problem in general: Specs are informal, outdated or not available at all. Often test cases are the only real specs. Verification is very valuable to reveal the inconsistencies in specifications. But the industrial reality is described with The real testing target : Which - of the unavoidable bugs we choose to ship the next product with? 9 NOKIA Cape.PPT/ /Nurminen Research Topics in Mobile Computing w.r.t Embedded Systems Power consumption Dynamic deadline scheduling controlling clock speed Code compression controlling memory access Code generation to select of right machine instructions Modeling and verification of application level power control Digital signal processing architectures and programming Better understanding real time audio and video streams Telephony, Netmeeting, Streaming media, On-line gaming Asymmetric vs. symmetric DSP-architectures Eg. Pentium MMX-type symmetric vs. TI OMAP asymmetric architecture Concurrency Most telecom control systems have a complex shared state How to make Linux-kernel more real-time? 10 NOKIA Cape.PPT/ /Nurminen

6 Research Topics in Mobile Computing w.r.t. Embedded Systems Real time RT-problems in telecom tend to have heavily statistical loads and qualityof-service requirements. Seamless wireless access across different wireless networks GSM, GRPS, 3G, BT, WLAN, RFTAG, How to maintain several different simultaneous connections? What is the right wireless access for an arbitrary service, user profile and network coverage -combination? Ubicomp vision (for years) Lot of very tiny devices having processing power, state, sensors, actuators connected with an ad hoc radio network. How to get robustness, resilience and reactivity using symmetric large scale distribution using best effort-approaches ala Internet? 11 NOKIA Cape.PPT/ /Nurminen Thank You! 12 NOKIA Cape.PPT/ /Nurminen