HP Labs India

Device, Connectivity and Cloud services

In most of the new growth markets, the penetration of mobile device has been an order of magnitude higher than the PC and its pace continues to accelerate. For example, in India alone, there are about 500M mobile subscriptions compared to only about 50M PCs (mostly coming from the enterprise and Internet café users). With the universal acceptance of the web becoming an extremely important and integral part of everyone’s life and with mobile device attaining almost ubiquitous presence, it is important to study how the mobile device and the PC might converge and how internet would be delivered to such a converged device.

Because of the lack of and the poor state of the wired broadband infrastructure in the developing world, wireless is the only means to quickly deploy broadband, cost efficiently, to the billions of the users if they are to benefit from the content/knowledge available on the web and to be part of the national and global economic eco-system. Wireless also brings down significantly the opex while improving reliability.

As time progresses, a significant amount of the computing and networking resources will come from the cloud virtually. This is also true with the services that will either reside in the cloud or distributed between it and the client device. All this calls for looking at the “user experience” from a fresh end-to-end perspective without the traditional notion of layering.

In this research thread, we study the current state-of-the-art of the client devices and their future evolution towards an ideal converged device which is more than a phone but less than a PC, yet portable and/or pocketable. We also conduct research in bridging the gap between user experience in the mobile domain and the stationary domain such as when the user is at home or in the office. The overall experience here is defined not only in-terms of the device and connectivity experience but also in-terms of the rich and intuitive human-computer interaction as explained in the other research threads being worked on at the labs. In the services research area, we leverage the immense wealth of capabilities available in the cloud to improve performance, increase reliability, and minimize cost both to the end-user and the service provider.

Our research areas in this thread include:

• Architectures
• Operating systems, hardware design, and systems integration
• Broadband access networks
• Inter-connectivity and inter-operability between fixed and mobile devices and networks
• Authentication and security
• Network and compute virtualization
• Cloud services

 

This page was last updated on April 27, 2010