COMSYS at Mobile World Congress 2012

COMSYS presents two projects of the UMIC research cluster at the 2012 Mobile World Congess (MWC 2012) -- the world's largest exhibition on mobile communications and mobile Internet technology

COMSYS Team at MWC 2012

Jo at the UMIC booth

Klaus presenting FlowPath (Segway indoor navigation)

COMSYS is presenting the following research projects of the UMIC research cluster at MWC 2012:

• FootPath and FlowPath:
  UMIC, as well as the chair for Communication and Distributed Systems at RWTH Aachen University will present a novel indoor navigation system, helping visitors to find their way in unfamiliar locations. While navigation systems have - mainly due to the ubiquity of satellite based positioning services such as GPS - become very common in the outdoor setting, this is not the case for the indoor setting. Challenges include the accurate localization, as well as the vailability of maps. Our system tackles both these aspects elegantly: Instead of finding our position in an arbitrary area, we restrict ourselves to finding the location on the path we are navigating on towards the destination. Using only the sensors already present in modern smartphones, we detect steps and their direction and map those onto said path. Finally, using OpenStreetMap, a wiki-like system for open extensible maps, we allow easy, extensible and incrementally deployments without the need for additional infrastructure or expensive calibration. 
  While this system works reliable for pedestrians - it does depend on steps after all - it was previously not working for wheelchairs and SegWays. With an elegant solution on how to derive the movement without any additional hardware from a smartphone (patent pending) we now present an extension bringing our indoor navigation technology to a completely new set of users, who depend even more on good local guidance systems.

• SoulMigration
  Furthermore, we will present SoulMigration, our approach to providing mobile users with a seamless working environment, when switching from one device to another, without the need for cloud resources. Users have many different devices and switch between them depending on their location and the device capabilities. Each time a user switches to another device the working context is lost and has to be manually reestablished on the new device. With the growing number of devices per user and an increasing need for mobility this becomes a cumbersome task. Our architecture automates and simplifies the migration process by providing the means to extract the current state information of an application, discover possible target devices, migrate the state to a target device, and finally reestablish the previous working state.