The European Commission has backed a new wireless
development platform designed to make it easier and cheaper for
service providers and users to develop and adopt mixed wireless
technologies.
The commission has put £1.2m into the Gollum (Generic Open
Link-Layer API for Unified Media) project. The initiative involves
several European universities and suppliers, including Aachen
University, ST Microelectronics, Microsoft, Materna, Telefonica and
Toshiba.
The aim of the project is to reduce the number of proprietary
programming interfaces needed to enable wireless devices to connect
to other terminals and servers through wired and wireless links.
This would reduce the development time and cost of mobile
multimedia platforms. Gollum also aims to improve functionality and
interoperability between devices.
The Gollum application programming interface - the Unified Link
Layer API (ULLA) - has been prototyped on a wide variety of
platforms, ranging from wireless sensors to PDAs, mobile phones and
high-end notebooks. With the ULLA, developers do not have to worry
about supporting technologies such as IEEE 802.11, UMTS/GPRS,
Bluetooth, Zigbee, UWB and Wimax.
The introduction of the ULLA in multimedia mobile terminals will
also avoid the need for end-users to perform any action to detect a
change in bandwidth, enabling context-sensitive applications, said
Petri M„h”nen of Aachen University, who is co-ordinating the Gollum
project.
He said wireless devices could adapt to changes in wireless
network connectivity and environments, allowing "smart
applications" to be developed.
Wireless device manufacturers and network operators will not
have to write device-specific code, so the specification could
enable faster and more cost-effective implementation of new
applications and services.
The Gollum project has already presented the first
implementation of an embedded, open operating system-independent
link-layer API to support various wireless access technologies.
Gollum's ULLA has been trialled on wireless platforms including
IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi, 3G, GPRS, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Wimax.
Wireless applications get smart
The Gollum Travel Guide, which uses a browser running on a
handheld device, was demonstrated at the CeBit trade show earlier
this month. The application downloaded city information,
sightseeing tips and other tourist information from a remote
server.
The Gollum API, ULLA, informs the application about the
available links and their bandwidth. If only a small bandwidth link
is available (GPRS), the application will only show text and small
pictures. If a higher bandwidth link (wireless Lan) becomes
available, the ULLA core will notify the application that the
context has changed and more bandwidth is available. The
application will react to this notification and show bigger
pictures and also video.