The Sunat unit in Athlone is helping companies to customise mobile phones and other hand-held devices for their own needs, reports Dick Ahlstrom
A new research centre at Athlone Institute of Technology (AIT) is helping people to go mobile. The €1.25 million centre is working on ways to exploit the growing number of communications networks and on developing new devices to use them.
The new Sunat (Seamless Use through Network Abstraction Technologies) applied research centre is based within the existing Software Research Centre at AIT, explains Sunat manager Enda Fallon.
A lecturer in software engineering and head of the Software Research Centre, Fallon says the new unit will help make it easier for companies to develop applications on devices such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other mobile devices.
Funding for Sunat has come from Enterprise Ireland through its Applied Research Enhancement programme. It will employ five full-time researchers who will join 20 others based in the Software Research Centre, says Fallon. Established at AIT in 2003, the centre has secured €3.5 million in research and technology transfer funding.
Sunat should benefit from opening at a time when the availability of mobile networks of all kinds are on the increase. This development matches a proliferation of hand-held devices able to communicate over these networks.
"There is an increasing number of networks available to users," Fallon says. "All these networks have different cost structures and different quality. What we are trying to do is engineer the quality of the networks and engineer the cost of these networks."
One of the great impediments to greater co-ordination is the uniqueness of hand-held devices because they are "incredibly non-standard", Fallon explains.
"It is difficult to write software for hand-held devices like mobile phones because a mobile phone needs the software customised specifically for each model. This project will make it easy for companies to write applications for mobile phones and hand-held devices themselves so they can use mobile networks or wireless networks when it is most suitable," says Fallon.
There is a balancing act required, however, between achieving high-quality connection and keeping costs at a level that is commercially viable. Fallon cites as an example a doctor visiting a patient in an emergency. The doctor might want to access remote files over a PDA and needs the best possible connection without regard to price. "The image provided on the PDA is important and the quality of the link is very important," says Fallon.
Yet the same doctor on a routine call, to do a regular check which is not time- sensitive, will have a different set of requirements. In this case, a standard connection will do at a lower price.
"There is a trade-off between the quality and the financial cost," Fallon says. "We are trying to get better quality for a lower price."
His group is already working with 15 companies, one of which manufactures heart monitors. It wants to create remote wireless access to these monitors, an example of the variety of the devices involved and also a measure of the reliability required to satisfy users.
The Sunat team will build an underlying "platform" to optimise the balance between quality and cost, Fallon says. This will make it easier for groups developing products and services to bring their wares to market.