Introduction

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Advances in wireless communication and the proliferation of mobile computing devices have ushered in a new era for mobile applications. There is a trend that users, no matter where they are located, would expect to able to generate requests and transactions to access different information, such as stock data, weather forecast, traffic information and other news, using portable computers, wearable computers and personal digital assistants through a wireless LAN or a radio cellular network, etc. Moreover, with the rapid increase in bandwidth available for wireless networks, support multimedia applications will soon be the norm rather than the exception.

The objective of the RTM2 project is to investigate important issues in the design and development of mobile real-time systems especially for multimedia applications. We will concentrate the three related areas: mobile computing, real-time database systems and distributed multimedia.

Initial effort of the projects will concentrate on real-time data management and the support of time-constrained transactions, especially those with soft real-time constraints (some of which may access multimedia information) for mobile computing. Project on the design of mobile multimedia systems are undergoing in parallel.

Objectives

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The objectives of the projects are:

	to establish an engineering skill in the area of mobile real-time and multimedia technology
	to develop an environment for demonstrating and assessing the potential for the application of emerging wireless technologies for real-time and multimedia applications
	to design efficient data management policies to support the dissemination of large amount of information to different mobile users
	to study issues in the design of multimedia mobile applications
	to identify and attract sponsorship for research in developing practical mobile real-time multimedia systems.

RTM² consists of three related areas

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	Real-Time Database Systems
	Mobile Computing Systems
	Distributed multimedia Systems

Prototypes

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	Mobile Video Stream Monitoring System
	RTMonitor: Real-Time Data Monitoring Using Mobile Agent Technology
	RETINA: A Real-time Traffic Navigation System

Related Research Grants

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	Prototyping of Distributed Real-time Database Systems (Period: Nov 95 to Oct 97) (CityU Strategic Grant, amount: HK$314,380) (Completed and the comment from the Research Committee of CityU on the result of the project was "Excellent".)
	Maintaining Data Consistency in Mobile Computing (Period: Jul 96 to Jun 98) (CityU Strategic Grant, amount: HK$388,141)
	Maintaining Temporal Consistency in Real-Time active Databases (Period: Jul 98 to Jul 2000) (Hong Kong UGC Grant, amount: HK$380,000)
	Scheduling Transactions in Distributed Real-time Active Database (Period: Oct 98 to Sep 2000) (CityU Strategic Grant, amount: HK$176,000)
	Scalable Strategies for Maintaining Cache Coherency for Mobile Web-Based Systems (Period: Sept 2000 to August 2002) (CityU Strategic Grant, amount: HK$225,400)
	Efficient Concurrency Control Protocols for Transactions in Mobile Real-time Database Systems (Period: Oct 2000 to Sept 2002) (Hong Kong UGC Grant, amount: HK$437,817)
	Monitoring of Real-time Data of Moving Objects in Mobile Computing Systems (Period: Nov 2001 to Oct 2003) (CityU Strategic Grant, amount: HK$239,400)
	Adaptive Strategies for Processing of Continuous Queries on Real-time Data in Mobile Computing Systems (Period: Oct 2002 to Sep 2004) (Hong Kong UGC Grant, amount: HK$413,404)
	Real-Time Data Stream Management in Intelligent Wireless Sensor Systems for Cooperative Control and Monitoring (Period: June 2003 to May 2005) (CityU Strategic Grant, amount: HK$167,400)
	Real-time Information Dissemination in Mobile Environment (PI: Edward Chan) (Period: Oct 99 to Sept 2001) (Hong Kong UGC Grant, amount: $405,000)
	Cache Maintenance Strategies for Mobile Web-based Systems (PI: Edward Chan) (Period: April 2001 to March 2003) (CityU Strategic Grant, amount: $250,000)