Mobile Traffic Information System

An Interactive Mobile Gateway Application

Introduction

Traffic information ahead of time is useful Georgia Intelligent Transportation System

provides information on www.georgia-navigator.com

But what if you are on the go? What if you don’t have a laptop? Cell phones: mobility and functionalities!

Functionalities:

Users can submit traffic information they have into the database

Users can query today’s traffic information stored in the database

Real world function: Users can view brief incident reports in wml from the official Georgia ITS website!

Problem Statements

The web server is also the DB server, so… Direct communication between cell phones

and the interface ASP.NET page?

No, the web server is on a dirty network!

Must have another application on a 130.127.x.x as a bridge to the ASP page.

cs.clemson.edu does not serve php

Architectureend user to DB

2.people:wml

3.people: php

4.hogwarts asp

5.hogwarts:ms sql

1.Mobile device

ArchitectureDB to end user

2.hogwarts: asp

3. people: wml embedded php

1. hogwarts:ms sql

4.MobileDevice

Architectureend user to GA ITS

2.people: php

3. cs: script& cron

1.Mobile device

4.Downloadfrom GA-ITS

Technology

Deck-IT cell phone simulator WML PHP WML embedded PHP ASP MS SQL Bash script

Implementation Keys

PHP: fopen(“hogwarts/aspx?var=value”,’r’); This triggers the asp page and activates it

with variables passed in. The file pointer then contains whatever ASP

page writes using Response.Write

Implementation Keys (GA ITS)

Automatic download from GA ITS Bash script with lynx command Taylor the file Set up the cron job PHP again, use fopen to read this file, prints

out between wml tags

Results and Demonstration

All functions are implemented correctly http://people.clemson.edu/~zhe/traffic.wml Try query and GA ITS with Deck-It If hogwarts is down, try GA ITS only

Conclusions

I believe the present solution is the simplest, and cleanest. It does not involve SOAP.

However, if I had access to a fully functional php server, things would be greatly simplified

I learnt how to make wml, php, and asp communicate with each other.

Future Works

This application set can be easily extended to many business applications for users to communicate with their company’s private (or not) DB and/or Web server(s)

Would like to refine information and tell GA ITS about my application to display info for cell phone users. They currently do not provide web services or wml pages.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Georgia ITS for providing consistent xml.gz file for educational downloading