ITDD450 Senior Project: January 2008

ITDD 450 Senior Project Team1

Project Proposal (ABSTRACT)

The aim of this research is to design, and develop a wireless application with distributed database capability for back-end storage. This software will utilize wireless technology in order to interact with local devices in range, and also offsite server. The software can be applied in such fields as health care, marketing, and other industries. The objective is to develop a wireless application that is suitable to use in many environments such as marketing, advertising, and the medical field. The database and wireless application will utilize such technologies as distributed databases for storage, GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication)[1]/GPRS[2] for long distance communication, and Bluetooth or WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) for local communications. Consequently, when the Bluetooth device is discovered in the network of nearby devices its location and information will be registered in the mobile stored in order to send customized messages.

Introduction

What is Bluetooth? Why does this technology have such an odd name? And why do we see it in almost every device currently offered by electronic manufacturers from computers, laptops, printers, and mobile phones to music players, home appliances, and even cars. Bluetooth was developed in 1994, by the Ericsson Corporation in Swedish based telecommunications company [1].Bluetooth previously known as MC link (and named after a tenth-century Danish king who unified his kingdoms Denmark and Norway)”[2] .The first Bluetooth devices hit the market around 1999”[3]Bluetooth was originally developed as a short range high data transmission solution in order to eliminate wires and cables. This technology also facilitates voice and data communications with the capability of self managing networks or ad-hoc networks. Ad-hoc networks have the capability of self organization.

“It's one of the most (if not the most) widely deployed and successful SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) systems in the world. Bluetooth technology has a very large installed based (over 500 million devices deployed) with current figures estimating that an additional five million Bluetooth devices are shipped every week”[4]. Bluetooth Architecture is designed to be service oriented, following flexible client/server model were an application can act concurrently as a server and a client. Bluetooth allows individuals to easily discover nearby Bluetooth enabled devices, based on the services offered. Services refer to the operations that a Bluetooth client can use that reside on a remote device, acting as a service provider, or server. Individuals can exchange variety of information and data using the Bluetooth medium such as text messages, images, audio, and video. As stated by Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) “The SIG has more than 9,000 member companies that are leaders in the telecommunications, computing, automotive, music, apparel, industrial automation, and network industries”[5] . Some well known SIG members to mention a few are 3Com Corp, Agilent Technology, Apple Inc, AT& T Corp, General Motor, IBM Corp, Mitsubishi Corp, Sony Corp, Sony-Ericsson Corp, and Siemens AG.

Bluetooth is a WLAN under the IEEE 802.11 family of wireless LAN technologies [6]. Bluetooth operates at 2.45 GHz unlicensed frequency, with currently three popular standards or classes depending on the power in terms of Watts. Bluetooth Class 1 operating at approximately 100 meters range, Bluetooth Class 2 at 10 meters, and Class 3 devices at 1 meters range as mentioned in Data Communications & Network security by Houston Carr. Currently, device manufacturers are offering Class 1 devices with 250 meters range. Clearly, one can see the advantages of Bluetooth for developing applications mobile applications that require low power consumption, client/server architecture, unlicensed frequency, and immense support by manufacturers. Therefore, the above mentioned reasons have persuaded the designers of this project to incorporate Bluetooth as the main wireless technology in developing the wireless application for both medical & marketing environments.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the proposed project promised to develop a MIDlet Bluetooth application that was capable of both specific service communication and generic communication to discovered devices. This wireless application suite was able to accomplish the task of being able to connect in a client/server fashion simultaneously using a established protocol RFCOMM. The application also demonstrated beyond its promise and worked without problems on an actual device the Nokia 3110c , which is an common mobile phone in the market with basic features. The wireless application was able to also send results from WLAN to across GSM , demonstrating global communications capability. The application discovered nearby devices, sent messages, collected discovered device info, and sent the data to the mobile database. The data was received by the GSM modem successfully. The project also created a configuration of distributed databases, with one master and three mirrors. The databases were normalized before implementation, and were successfully loaded in MySQL Server. However, this project fell short of two other objectives in the back-end. First the GSM information although received was not able to be inserted into the database. This was do to the fact that API required for USB connection in JAVA has not been officially released. As stated in Sun Microsystems developer forum the javax.comm package that deals with serial port connections has also been deprecated for development in Windows OS. The other uncompleted task was do to the lack of knowledge in replication in MySQL Server environment. The MySQL Server replication procedures were followed preciously many times, but failed to yield any results or even errors to report on. The replication codes and procedures are documents in the above section called Replication Process. Consequently, the team completed several of its main objects, however unforeseen technical issues, change of communication packages by Sun Microsystems prevented the team from being able to complete all promised deliverables.

ITDD450 Senior Project

Wednesday, January 23, 2008