Story of our Portfolio

In late 1999 and early 2000, the question was:

” Is it at all possible to keep an internet connection in a fast moving environment such as in a car or train moving at high speed, while obtaining 1Mbps or even 10Mbps of speed?”

Back in 1999, the mobile technology available with “fast” internet was WiFi and some initial developments were made using “Packet Data” services such as Motorola iDEN and others.  But generally it was not possible to watch a YouTube Video in a speeding bullet train back then.

Our research began at the University of Florida in a class called “Mobile Computing” taught by Dr. Helal, and a small simulator was created using C/C++:

Later on this simulator was replaced with formal research using NS-2, a network simulator created by the networking community with some mobile extensions. However, at that time NS-2 was unable to provide reliable and repeatable mobile simulations that enabled us to answer the question in hand. As such, RAMON was created as part of Edwin Hernandez, PhD Dissertation at that time. RAMON was a hardware tool that consisted in using a network emulator, NIST while simulating the wireless physical layer of propagation, simulated with a simple Path Loss model (PL) which matched a particular equation for the frequency in use, in the case of RAMON, 2.4GHz.

RAMON was a stable and reliable system to test and create mobile protocols, and that is how the “Predictive Mobile IP” protocol was built and created using Mobile IP. In this particular case, Dynamics Mobile IP was used as a baseline.  This protocol uses entities in the network to enable the creation of tunnels that are predicted based upon your location in the wireless infrastructure.

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