Trilight Zone

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IBM Research is working on delivering a middleware system that will enable users to tap into the data on mobile devices to create a virtually unlimited pool of data and provide essentially infinite access to the Internet, the company said.

Stefan Schoenauer, a researcher at the company's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., said IBM Research, as part of the company's IBM Extreme Blue program, has developed a prototype of a data-sharing middleware platform for mobile devices that will enable heterogeneous devices, regardless of their operating systems or hardware, to access the network via various communication modes, including device-to-device direct communications.

The middleware platform, code-named Infinity, will allow users to use mobile devices to search and analyze limitless amounts of data that was previously inaccessible, Schoenauer said. In addition, the system has built-in security and privacy features that allow users to control authorized access levels.

Schoenauer is the lead researcher mentoring the core team that came up with the Infinity project. What prompted the Infinity project was a great big "what if," Schoenauer said: What if all the information stored in devices like cell phones, PDAs, RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips and USB sticks could be accessed much the way Web sites are today, or even more easily?

The possibilities for new applications would be infinite, the IBM team decided, hence the code name for the project.

Indeed, IBM's research team, which has a group of undergraduate engineering students and an MBA student at its core, proposed that Infinity would significantly transform the Internet by allowing access to the world's highly distributed data sources. Moreover, the technology marks a critical first step toward exploring how integration in mobile networks could precipitate the growth of a new information marketplace, IBM said.

IBM officials said they believe Infinity will provide a middleware framework for linking heterogeneous mobile devices into real-time, mobile, ad hoc networks that can process queries and share data. Riding the wave of the rapidly increasing number of mobile phones, PDAs and other portable computing devices, Infinity could help to shift the Internet from a network of pages to a network of data sources, IBM said.

Infinity is based on a number of industry-standard technologies, including XML, HTTP, HTML, JavaScript and Bluetooth technology.