Lab hardware - new equipment

So far we didn't write much about the hardware we've got in our lab. Perhaps people will find it interesting to read about what kind of equipment we've got and our experiences with them, so here is a start on sharing that.

Our lab is primarily setup for research in residential and next-generation networking. We have a core network, to be described later, with two home networks connected to it. This allows us to setup scenarios like "home network" and a visited network like "hotel room network", "friend's network", etc. Will try to describe this part in more detail in future posts, in addition to the various devices in them.

Lately we got the following new equipment: a Macbook Air and a Synology DS207+ disk station. More on the Synology disk drive in a future article.

Macbook Air
Probably many people have written similar about the Macbook Air: Reading about it is one thing, but holding it in your own hands is really a big surprise because it is so thin and light. Especially in the beginning I was worried to break it in two, but so far it is in one piece!

To be specific, the machine we've got is the standard version with 1.6 GHz CPU. Since we don't plan to use it as part of our core network that should be enough horsepower. Rather, we will use it as a client device in various scenarios and as a travel companion when necessary.

We had some trouble setting up Time Machine to use our new NAS device (more about the Synology NAS later) for storage of the backups. After we Google'd around a bit we found some helpful posts. First, support for using external disk drives must be enabled in OSX:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Next, because Apple did some changes to OSX (and possibly later, to be tried) it still won't work. It seems like it works, because Time Machine will create files on the network drive but after some time it stops with the message "The backup image could not be created". Sounds very strange since it seems to successfully create it. That is probably one reason why Apple does not officially support this configuration (the root reason might be that they would like us to buy the Apple Time Capsule instead of using other vendor's products).

Anyhow, Johnny Chadda seems like he found a workaround for this. In addition, Kuro5hin has an article describing the problem more in depth and a similar workaround. We have yet to try these workarounds, but hopefully it will finally work.

Then, after playing a little around with OSX the Boot Camp Assistant came handy to install Microsoft Windows Vista on a separate partition. Together with Microsoft Office it works very fine on the laptop. Fortunately, they've added support for using the Apple Remote Control from Windows too now.

Two papers for NGMAST 2008 accepted

We got two papers accepted for the 2nd IEEE Conference and Exhibition on Next Generation Mobile Applications, Services and Technologies (NGMAST 2008). The conference takes place 16.-19. September in Cardiff, Wales.

The two papers accepted are:
[1] A. Häber, M. Gerdes, F. Reichert, A. Fasbender, and R. Kumar, "Delivering Services to Residential Appliances by Utilizing Remote Resource Awareness," in 2nd IEEE Conference and Exhibition on Next Generation Mobile Applications, Services and Technologies (NGMAST 2008), Cardiff, Wales, 2008.

Abstract:

Service providers are nowadays offering a variety of services, and in particular multimedia content delivery. Besides, consumer appliances are increasingly becoming digitalized including support for communication networks. However, it is difficult, and in many cases impossible, to use these services with standard consumer appliances, such as TV and media player devices. Rather, usage is often restricted so that they can only be accessed through web browsers from PCs, mobile phones and similar terminals. This is unfortunate, because dedicated consumer appliances are often better suited to handle the content and thereby give consumers a better experience. Within this paper, three design approaches that support such services are described and compared, along with a prototype that shows this concept.

[2] A. Fasbender, S. Hoferer, M. Gerdes, T. Matsumura, A. Häber, and F. Reichert, "Phone-controlled Delivery of NGN Services into Residential Environments," in 2nd IEEE Conference and Exhibition on Next Generation Mobile Applications, Services and Technologies (NGMAST 2008), Cardiff, Wales, 2008.

Abstract:

The horizontally layered architecture of the
IMS/NGN standards family enables the delivery of services
independent of access network and requesting device. In this
article, the authors propose a further separation of service
control and delivery, allowing the requesting device – in
particular a user’s mobile phone – to invite other devices –
we will focus on DLNA appliances – into the service
delivery, thereby enhancing both user experience and service
design flexibility. The proposed solution builds on
exploiting proximity technologies (e.g. barcodes, NFC) for
pairing the control device with a remote environment.
Motivated by scenarios, the architecture concepts are
explained and a prototype implemented for validation is
described. Selected findings and a short overview of related
standardization efforts conclude the paper.