Masters student: Wilson Wu, 2006 (cum laude)

Supervisors: Aleksandar Radovanovic and Bill Tucker

Project link

Overview

There is a growing interest in Internet Protocol location-based services (LBS) among mobile users. Many services are being provided by the service operators around the world including South Africa. Location applications include people finding, directory services, driving directions, location based billing or advertising and mobile commerce. At present, LBS are mostly bound to a specific technology and usually incompatible with each other. New technologies, like WiMax, and “nomadic” IEEE 902.16e [1] will make this problem even more apparent. To make LBS services available, standard geospatial IP based protocols, consistent across application domains, and diverse technology infrastructures of communication service providers must be developed.

The proposed project hopes to provide basis for an innovative Internet Protocol (IP) based LBS available over number of underlying network technologies that protect privacy of the user by handling geographic location information in a private and secure fashion.

Related work

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the IETF standard for the establishment of multimedia sessions. These sessions might be used for audio, video, instant messaging, or other real-time data communication sessions. IETF “SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE)” working group is focusing on the instant messaging and presence (IMP) application of the SIP. [2]. RFC 2778 “A Model for Presence and Instant Messaging, J. Rosenberg, February 2000” defines an abstract model for a Presence and Instant Messaging system.

Previous work

The project started at the beginning of the 2004 by literature survey and defining research questions. The work is presented in a paper “SIP Presence Location Service “, W. Wu, A. Radovanovic, accepted for SATNAC 2004 conference.

Research Questions

This research project aims at enhancing the SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol For Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) protocol to protect sensitive location information. To achieve this goal, we are employing a Rule Holder, a new server that will be used to store and manage rules. The Presence server will query the Rule Holder before responding to a client request. A set o common rules, which are stored in Rule Holder, will be applied to the geographical information object to define what information is visible and to whom.

Methodology

The prototyping methodology will be used. [3]

Bibliography

[1] IEEE 802.16 and WiMAX - Broadband Wireless Access for Everyone, Intel White Paper, www.intel.com/netcomms/events/downloads/ieee80216_wp.pdf

[2] SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (simple), www.ietf.org/html.charters/simple-charter.html

[3] System Analysis and Design Methods, Jeffrey L. Whitten and Lonnie D. Bentley, McGraw-Hill/Irwin; 6 edition (June 26, 2003)