Moby Dick, on the design of a Swiss-army knife of computing

Recent advances in wireless networking technology and the exponential development of semiconductor technology have engendered a new paradigm of computing, called personal mobile computing or ubiquitous computing. This offers a vision of the future with a much richer and more exciting set of architecture research challenges than extrapolations of the current desktop architectures. In particular, these devices will have limited battery resources, will handle diverse data types, and will operate in environments that are insecure, dynamic and which vary significantly in time and location. The research performed in the MOBY DICK project on the University of Twente in the Netherlands is about designing such a mobile multimedia system. This talk discusses the approach made in the MOBY DICK project to solve some of these problems, discusses its main contributions, and accesses what was learned from the project. Specific contributions of our research are the design of an energy-efficient architecture for mobile multimedia systems and a reconfigurable connection switch, as well as the design of crucial wireless network functions (i.e. MAC protocol, adaptable network interface, and errorcontrol) that are energy efficient and can support multimedia traffic. Various aspects of our design are discussed in more detail. 1 Personal mobile computing In recent years, technology drivers changed significantly. High-end systems used to direct the evolution of computer architectures and systems. Now low-end systems drive technology, due to their large volume and attainable profits. Advances in technology enable portable computers to be equipped with wireless interfaces, allowing networked communication even while on the move. Whereas today’s notebook computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are self contained, tomorrow’s networked mobile computers are part of a greater computing infrastructure. Two trends – multimedia applications and mobile computing – will lead to a new application domain and market in the near future. Personal mobile computing (often also referred to as ubiquitous computing [17]) will play a significant role in driving technology in the next decade. In this paradigm, the basic personal computing and communication device will be an integrated, battery-operated device, small enough to carry along all the time. This device will be used as a replacement of many items the modern human-being carries around. It will incorporate various functions like a pager, cellular phone, laptop computer, diary, digital camera, video game, calculator and remote control. An important issue will be the user interface: the interaction with its owner. The device will support multimedia tasks like speech recognition, video and audio. Wireless networking greatly enhances the usability of a personal computing device. It provides mobile users with versatile communication, and permits continuous access to services and resources of the landbased network. A wireless infrastructure capable of supporting packet data and multimedia services in addition to voice will bootstrap on the success of the Internet, and in turn drive novel networked applications and services. However, the technological challenges to establishing this paradigm of personal mobile computing are non-trivial. In particular, these devices have limited battery resources, will handle diverse data types, and will operate in environments that are insecure, unplanned, and show different characteristics in time.