The goal of this area is to enhance network capabilities for emerging mobile applications, including Multimedia, Collaboration and Sharing, Gaming, mCommerce, and Social Networking. We are interested in wireless device network enhancements that support the evolution towards pervasive wireless networks.
Given the explosion of mobile users and the proliferation of heterogeneous wireless networks, Cisco Research is actively looking to securely and seamlessly integrate applications and services with mobile clients. This requires innovations in mobile clients, mobile user experience, service delivery network, platforms, enterprise applications, wireless communications, and unified management.
We are also actively seeking research proposals in wireless and mobile technology areas such as:
Near Field Communications
Personal Area Wireless
Local Area Wireless
Regional Area Wireless
Broadband Wireless
Cellular Wireless.
Enhancing Mobile User Experience
Mobile user experience is more than just providing mere access to content or services in mobile format. Based on today's diverse content and service sources, constant mobility of users across heterogeneous wireless networks, privacy and security factors, the key areas of research we are interested in are:
How can a mobile user maintain single identity, move profile, and context irrespective of client devices being used or wireless networks being traversed
How can a mobile user seamlessly operate across these diverse networks and continue to access content or service without any interruption
How can a mobile client with multiple air interfaces, automatically sense the communication environment and adapt to the mobile user preferences in terms of selecting wireless links, application specific bandwidth and QoS requirements, and service models (free vs. paid)
How can a mobile user gracefully recover from a service interruption
Are there ways in which a mobile client, in conjunction with a network, can diagnose and identify root cause of service disruption
How can a mobile user receive targeted and personalized content or service based on user's temporal, location, and behavioral characteristics without compromising user privacy
How can emerging mobile applications be integrated to a mobile client without introducing new security holes or vulnerabilities
How can battery life be extended?
Mobile Service Delivery Networks
Today's networks are becoming more content and service aware. However, further advancements in making network participate in enhancing mobile user experience and improving the end-to-end security is essential. Some of the areas in which the network can participate are:
Network participation in delivery of services and content to mobile client in a seamless and secure manner without burdening the client with too much computation
Network participation in profiling mobile users in temporal, location, contextual, and behavioral dimension without compromising user privacy
Increase of the wireless connection bandwidth through schemes such as caching, redundancy elimination, compression, and protocol optimization
Wireless networks participation in effectively detecting security anomalies
How can network management tools be made more automatic and effective in heterogeneous wireless environment so that end user can be prompted of root cause of service disruption and is provided alternative ways of service recovery?
Wireless Communications
Despite tremendous advancements, wireless communication technologies face the challenges of TX/RX power requirements, mobility, channel capacity, multi-path, signal obstruction, and increasing interference resulting in decreased reliability, range and throughput. Continued advancements in coding, radio, and antenna techniques are very essential in mitigating or reducing these adverse effects. Some of the areas of research interest are:
Highly efficient network coding and error correcting techniques
Advanced Radio Techniques
Advanced Antenna Technologies to increase path diversity, mobility and bandwidth.
Other areas of interest:
Near Field Communication
Wireless Sensor Networks
Power and compute efficient Software Defined Radio(SDR) for flexibility and programmability.
If your research topic doesn't directly address any of the RFPs listed above, please submit it as a generic proposal for this area.
If you have comments, questions or feedback related to this area please don't hesitate to contact us at research-wireless@cisco.com
