GOLLUM unifies wireless technologies for mobile devices
15 March 2006
Aachen, Germany, and Agrate, Italy. An EC-funded project has developed a
programming interface to unify the different methods used to access the many
wireless and wired technologies currently in use.
A consortium of seven partners, comprised of universities and R&D units
from industry from four European countries, has presented the first
implementation of an embedded, open, operating-system-independent link-layer
API (Application Programming Interface) to unify the various methods for
accessing different wired and especially wireless links. Termed GOLLUM
(Generic Open Link-Layer API for Unified Media access), the project has been
sponsored by the European Commission with a total contribution of 1.8
Million Euros.
Mobile multimedia terminals, such as wireless phones, PDAs, interactive
set-top boxes, laptops and other applications are becoming more and more
common in people's everyday lives. A considerable part of the cost of those
terminals resides in the number and complexity of software interfaces
required to enable them to connect with other terminals and servers through
wired and wireless links. In fact, a separate programming interface exists
for almost every wireless technology.
The primary objectives of the GOLLUM API are to reduce the development
time and cost of mobile multimedia platforms, and to improve their
functionality and interoperability. It simplifies wireless access
programming as seen by developers, while providing more flexibility and new
features for innovative products. This API is called the Unified Link Layer
API (ULLA) and has been prototyped on a wide variety of platforms, ranging
from wireless sensors to PDAs, mobile phones up to high-end notebooks. ULLA
conceals diversity of technologies like IEEE802.11, UMTS/GPRS, Bluetooth,
Zigbee, UWB, WiMAX and others.
ULLA can help with a variety of applications such as programming of
connection managers, Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) agents on mobile phones
and optimisation of multimedia streaming applications. It is also a possible
enabling technology towards software defined and cognitive radios.
Trial implementations of the GOLLUM API show considerable advantages over
existing solutions. Through the uniform API, a range of legacy as well as
future technologies can be handled in a transparent and simple way. The
support for asynchronous notifications allows applications to react
dynamically to events happening on the available communication links.
Finally, the API is also light enough to be applied to a large variety of
computer equipment including sensors, embedded and mobile devices. In
summary, the GOLLUM API will allow application and middleware to better
interact with wired and wireless networks, thus permitting programmers to
focus on their goals rather than on the API.
To demonstrate the advantages of the GOLLUM API, the consortium has
developed a demo application called the GOLLUM Travel Guide. This
application consists of a simple browser that runs on a handheld device and
downloads city information, sight-seeing tips, and other tourist information
from a remote server. The ULLA interface informs the application about the
available links and their bandwidth. If only a small bandwidth link is
available (the current demonstration is done with GPRS) the application will
only show text and small pictures. If a higher bandwidth link becomes
available (Wireless LAN), 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.
"The adoption of the GOLLUM API will enable operators and software
vendors to provide new kinds of services and greatly enhance the user
experience," said Professor Petri Mahonen from RWTH Aachen University who is
coordinating the activities of the GOLLUM consortium. "In fact, terminals
could properly adapt to changes in wireless network connectivity and
environments, allowing new smart applications to be developed," continued
Prof. Mahonen. "The current reference implementation and demonstration is a
fruit of the hard work carried out by the consortium during the last year,
and leverages the long-term research and development work done by the core
partners previously."
The introduction of the GOLLUM API in multimedia mobile terminals will
bring two strong benefits. Firstly end users do not have to perform any
operations to detect bandwidth-change events; thus enabling context
sensitive applications. Secondly terminal manufacturers and network
operators will find that programmers can use their own company's link layer
independent code on top of ULLA to develop applications and services, rather
than writing device-specific code close to the hardware of the mobile
device. This allows for faster and more cost-effective implementation of new
applications and services.
The partners in the GOLLUM project are RWTH Aachen University,
STMicroelectronics (NYSE:STM) , European Microsoft Innovation Centre,
MATERNA, Telefonica, Toshiba Research Europe and the University of
Cantabria.
More information
The Gollum project
www.ist-gollum.org/
To top
|