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Marco Roccetti Università di Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, I-40127 Bologna, Italy
Vittorio Ghini Università di Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, I-40127 Bologna, Italy
Paola Salomoni Università di Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, I-40127 Bologna, Italy
Alessandro Gambetti Università di Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, I-40127 Bologna, Italy
Davide Melandri Università di Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, I-40127 Bologna, Italy
Mirko Piaggesi Università di Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, I-40127 Bologna, Italy
Daniela Salsi Università di Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, I-40127 Bologna, Italy

Symposium on Applied Computing archive
Proceedings of the 2002 ACM symposium on Applied computing table of contents
Madrid, Spain
SESSION: Virtual reality, digital media, and computer games table of contents
Pages: 1066 - 1073
Year of Publication: 2002
ISBN:1-58113-445-2

Abstract: Developing enhanced wireless Internet applications is becoming one of the upcoming challenges for mobile radio networks operators. In this paper we introduce and discuss the general software architecture of a wireless Internet-based application we have designed and implemented to support the distribution of Mp3-based musical songs to UMTS devices. We have examined the effects that Internet traffic has on the performance of wireless UMTS networks, due to the distribution of Mp3 files by means of our wireless application. The download time measurements we have experimentally obtained have shown that an appropriate structuring of the Internet-based wireless application may be very helpful to surmount the problems caused by the Internet standard protocols which were not especially designed for wireless environments.

My Discussion:
More of an infrastructure paper than a UI paper. In order to deal with possible congestion downloading music from many connected clients at the same time, the music is stored redundantly in several libraries. The user on the mobile client browses and selects what music to download, and then a gateway box assembles the musci by downloading different pieces of the musci from several of the libraries, thus creating less bottlenecks... except the obvious one: the gateway itself that has to service all these clients. No word on allowing the handset client do its own assembly from the many libraries, which would have created redundancy.

The authors did architect a solution that would allow for dealing with dropped or throttled connectiuons as is so ubiquitous when using mobile networks, and for which most wired applications do not account. It is based on having their own session layer between the application (both on server and handset) and the network, a session layer that exchanges checkpoints about where the download to the client was interrupted, and can pick up from a checkpoint when the user re-connects.