Andrew Paddon, a Macquarie alumnus at Nokia's Australian headquarters in Ulitmo, is interested in having students undertake honours projects using Nokia's state-of-the-art facilities. Andrew is a Senior Applications Architect in Mobile Software Integration, and he has a $10M laboratory with its own GPRS core network -- a complete mobile network with switch, gateway, phone tower, transmitter and handsets. In Andrew's words: "Any ideas from students on what they might do with this kit will be cool with me." Listed below are some possible projects to get you thinking.

1. Investigating routing methods and instructions for location detection: Whenever someone makes a call we know who, what, when and where they are. Location Based services give an output dependent on a person's location. One aspect of this is mapping and routing information for people. Nokia has a Location Based Service platform called mPosition to act as an interface to the core network and pull out this information. How is it best utilized for mapping and location-aware services?

2. Discovery and lookup in a Bluetooth environment: Bluetooth is a new network radio technology allowing devices to connect to each other in a peer to peer or client server model. Javaspaces and Jini are the standard Sun method of doing discovery and lookup: how should these be used for Bluetooth? How do active agents work?

3. Routing in Bluetooth: Routing in a Mobile Network is completely different from Ethernet routing because devices connected to the internet generally do not move about. Bluetooth supports a client server model where mobile devices may connect to a Web Server or some other piece of fixed internet infrastructure. How can routing issues across the mobile and fixed networks be solved?

4. Digital Rights management over wireless connections: What is the most efficient method of managing digital rights for Mobile internet services? That is, you put content up on the net: how do you stop people ripping it off? How can encryption be best handled within a limited device configuration (not necessarily the Java CLDC)? How can interoperability issues be solved -- can this work when a guy with an Ericsson handset sends to a Nokia one?

5. Multimedia Messaging Clients: All new handsets will support the ability to send multimedia messages (MMS). Yet as new media types are developed MMS clients will quickly be superceded. What is the most effective design for this software?

6. Multimedia Messaging Applications on the Nokia MMSC: According to MMS architecture, MMSs (multimedia messages) are transmitted in HTTP request objects. These can be relatively large. What issues does this have for existing web servers used to host the MMS applications? How should applications be designed to facilitate MMS? How are performance differences in the MMSC (Multimedia Messaging Service Centre) and the Application Server handled? Evaluate the effectiveness of the MMS binary encoding scheme; how does this compare to a text based scheme like XML/XHTML?

7. Streaming: How can streaming multimedia over a mobile network be best achieved?

8. Refactoring mobile internet development: What are the essential characteristics of a 4G network and how should services for it be architected? How can you architect services for existing networks with 4G and beyond in mind? If 3G is WCDMA and can deliver 2MBs in total to a cell, what is a 4G network?

9. Java Midlets: One of the features of new Nokia handsets is the ability to design MIDP Java applications and send them to a handset -- any handset. What is the best way of doing this? Issues to resolve nclude handset interoperability, display types, memory, handset OS issues and so on.

10. Symbian: If you don't like Java you can write straight to the operating system of the handset, ie Symbian. Given other applications are written in Symbian (the phone book, the answering mechanism, media players), what communications model is best?

11. OTAP: Over the Air Protocol sends signals to the handset and gets it to do stuff, like store an SMS, answer a call, store a contact, retrieve an MMS or ... self destruct, copy the contact book, reset access points....

12. The Reality: The most difficult part of any mobile internet application is the commercial reality. Services must successfully satisfy a subscriber's need, the operator must be able to bill for the application, and the total development and deployment cost must price the application within the subscriber's budget. So what is a good mobile internet service? How do you bill for it? How do you provision and deploy the service? and How do you develop it?