The use of multimedia conferencing tools has become widespread within the business world. The Pilot Interactive Mobile Multimedia System study aims to extend these tools to work within a mobile environment. The major issue raised by mobility is the sometimes dramatically reduced bandwidth between mobile hosts and the fixed network. A transcoding gateway will be produced that will use techniques such as frame dropping and image degredation to reduce the size of data sent over the link. Security concerns are also important.
Wireless links leave communications wide open to interception.
The latest version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6, addresses this and other mobility issues. We hope to set up a mobile testbed using wireless and infra-red networking and IPv6 to assess how well it meets our needs, and how our transcoding gateway can best fit into the network. An initial IR small-scale system will be developed to test our ideas. Dynamic Resource Discovery and Adaptive Resource Management for Mobile Computing Jon Crowcroft and Bhrat Patel Mobile computers can move quickly between very varied environments. Other services such as printers and file servers vary in their availability.