Odysseus

Interfaces to mobile voting applications are still incredibly primitive. Today, most mobile voting systems in Europe use a very rudimentary SMS-based interface; more specifically, voting typically involves sending a non-intuitive string to a quite arbitrary number.

We currently have an activity which is focussed on making interfaces to mobile voting systems much more intuitive and user-friendly. Further, one objective of this system is to enable votes to be created quickly and easily by small user groups so that mobile voting could be used, for example, to elect a class representative. A final point worth mentioning here is that the intention is to shift the emphasis of the voting system to a more distributed internet based model, rather than being restricted by the systems offered by mobile network operators today.

There are two main aspects to this work: making the interface to the voting system more userfriendly and providing a mechanism by which votes can be easily added by small users and accessed by anyone with a mobile device.

The first activity is reasonably straightforward and we have developed a J2ME based application which provides much of this functionality. The second activity is more challenging and is more research based. It is this activity that requires the efforts of an intern student.

The work will involve devising an appropriate architecture for the system. It seems appropriate that this would be based on the peer-to-peer paradigm if there are going to be a significant number of transient votes in the system. The peers in the system would most likely be fixed nodes which are providing the voting service. These peers would provide some search capability and would be used to find a particular vote from the various votes that exist in the system. Finally, the student would be required to develop a prototype of this system which could be used in conjunction with the userinterface mentioned above.

Relevance of Project to the Host Laboratories:

Issues with Mobile Application Development are of interest to PEL. More specifically, we are interested in the use of mobile software platforms such as C# and J2ME to realise more intuitive mobile applications. Further, in conjunction with our vision that there will be a greater decoupling of network access provider and service provider in future networks, we are interested in ways to realise applications that are independent of the network provider while still offering reasonable reliability, scalability and accessibility options. To this end, peer2peer solutions could form part of the solution.

Supervisors:

Dr. John Murphy (Computer Science and Informatics, UCD)

Keywords:

Mobile Application Development; Peer-to-Peer; J2ME; Mobile Voting.