Wireless Application Development has become a major area of research in recent times. With the increasing availability of wireless technologies such as cellular, Bluetooth, Infrared etc. it has become essential to develop applications that suit the various types of hardware that support such wireless technologies. The goal of this thesis is to explore the motivations behind application development methodologies and the tools associated with it, for small mobile devices that employ cellular technologies. Due to extremely high demand of cell phones among people who have over the years become extra mobile, there has been a trend of decreasing costs for users for the last several years. As more people start using these devices every day the demand for support of various applications and services are on the rise. This thesis will explore the leading application development tools and technologies for small mobile devices WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), J2ME (Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition) and some others. This thesis will also take a brief look into cellular network technology termed 3G, in terms of its usefulness for applications developed using the aforementioned technologies. The thesis includes the development of a J2ME application using a wireless device emulator.

The popularity of mobile devices and location-based services (LBS) have created great concerns regarding the location privacy of the users of such devices and services. Anonymization is a common technique that is often being used to protect the location privacy of LBS users. This technique assigns a random pseudonym to each user and these pseudonyms can change over time. Here, we provide a general information theoretic definition for perfect location privacy and prove that perfect location privacy is achievable for mobile devices when using the anonymization technique appropriately. First, we assume that the user’s current location is independent from her past locations. Using this i.i.d model, we show that if the pseudonym of the user is changed before O(n2/(r−1)) number of anonymized observations is made by the adversary for that user, then she has perfect location privacy, where n is the number of users in the network and r is the number of all possible locations that the user might occupy. Then, we model each user’s movement by a Markov chain so that a user’s current location depends on his previous locations, which is a more realistic model when approximating real world data. We show that perfect location privacy is achievable in this model if the pseudonym of the user is changed before O(n2/(|E|−r)) anonymized observations is collected by the adversary for that user where |E| is the number of edges in the user’s Markov model.