Bulletin

Issue: August 2004

Research in Action

Mobile communications: making them faster, more secure

More efficient and secure mobile phones, computer notebooks and personal data assistants are the aim of a joint research project by La Trobe University and the City University of Hong Kong.

Early results of the collaboration have encouraged Professor Jia Xiaohua, of CUHK's Department of Computer Science, and Dr Jinli Cao of La Trobe's Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, to expect they will have developed improved technology within three years.

To achieve this, they are working on new algorithms, combining their expertise on two of the vital aspects of the problem - Dr Cao's expertise on database systems and data management and Professor Jia's experience as a world-authority on mobile network computing and distributed systems.

Professor Jia was at La Trobe as a Distinguished Visiting Professor during June and July. He is also co-founder of the International Conference on Web Information Systems and Engineering and a permanent member of the conference's steering committee.

He said he and Dr Cao plan to make a substantial contribution to the next generation of mobile phones, notebooks and personal data assistants by developing 'ad hoc networks'. These aim to give mobile device users instant access to the most up-to-date data from data centres while improving the security between data base and mobile devices.

With mobile devices becoming more popular - and used for more sophisticated applications such as e-banking, e-business and on-line transactions on stocks - a problem is that many items in the database from which the device downloads change so rapidly that, by the time the user applies the data, it could be out of date.

'Imagine a stockbroker downloading market information and using it to draw up a contract, and finding that soon after the data was received, it changed,' Professor Jia said. 'This means that we must find a way to efficiently synchronise our mobile device with the database.'

With other teams around the world working on the same problems, Dr Cao and Professor Jia recognise they will need to be first to come up with solutions to have any chance of commercialising their research.

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