July 2005

Calit2 and UCSD campus police collaborate on advanced technology projects

As part of our RESCUE effort, Calit2 is actively collaborating with the UCSD campus police on numerous technology prototyping projects. Some of these are actively used by the campus police, while others are still under development.

The UCSD police department provides a number of services to the campus community by way of Community Service Officers (CSOs), university students who patrol campus on bicycles to ensure the safety of the campus community. However, the police department itself is significantly short staffed and does not have the manpower to continuously monitor the safety of these CSOs. They were looking for IT and wireless systems to help solve this and other problems. Researchers at Calit2 recognized these problems and proposed to build solutions based on some of the most recent advances in cellular and mobile information technology. We are using Qualcomm's gpsOne/Brew framework with CDMA handsets. Cellular-based positioning technology is superior to traditional GPS because of its hybrid approach of using both a server and the mobile phone, or client, to obtain a position fix. This approach reduces the time it takes to get a position fix, increases accuracy of the fix obtained, and works indoors because it doesn't need line-of-sight to satellites. The technology works inside buildings, but is only accurate enough to give an approximate location within a building, rather than track someone's movements in a building. Its accuracy depends how deep you are inside the building (e.g., better fix if you are close to windows or to the exterior walls). Due to the low cost, small form factor, and improved battery life over existing GPS solutions, the cell phone has proved to be very attractive for the law enforcement officials in these and other application scenarios.

One of the fist applications the Calit2 researchers developed, and which is currently being actively used by the UCSD Police Department, was a geofencing application. This application has multiple possible uses, one of which is that it allows law enforcement officers to set a virtual perimeter using a cell phone to protect physical assets. The officials can set a virtual boundary with a specific radius around the asset they wish to monitor and if the asset leaves that boundary the officials are alerted both via a desktop application in the control center, and via SMS to their cell phones. They can then track the location of the asset in real time, using the desktop application to follow and find the asset, which is equipped with GPS-enabled cellular technology. This application is also being used to improve patrol organization and increase efficiency in dispatching CSOs to the site of an incident or call, as it allows the command center to track CSOs along their scheduled route and determine who is closest to the site of a reported incident. The next version of this application will enable the CSOs to view their location and incident locations on their cell phones.

RESCUE research aims to improve reliability of cellular networks

At UCI, RESCUE researchers have an on-going effort to design a next-generation reflective architecture for cellular systems as a means to support survivability, fault-tolerance, and scalability in rapidly changing/adverse environments. In a reflective architecture, a system monitors conditions internal to itself to dynamically reconfigure resource allocations in order to achieve better performance. In this work, we are trying to identify challenges that arise in next-generation cellular infrastructure without necessitating a complete redesign of existing cellular technology.

Why the need for this research? As reliable as today's cellular networks are, they can fail when overstressed. A recent example of an overstressed network is shown in the following two paragraphs, condensed from the July 8, 2005, edition of the Wall Street Journal , published the day following the London terrorist bombings.