Lancaster University

It is commonly acknowledged that the market for mobile phones has reached a level of saturation and that mobile operators have invested heavily in the provision of 3G services.  There is therefore a real need for applications which encourage adoption of new devices and services.  This unique degree scheme is aimed at providing students which the highly specialised skill set for two areas which are considered to be among the most important which are Mobile Games and M-Commerce.

There is a growing importance placed by mobile manufactures on embedded games, and with mobile gaming revenues expected to reach £5 billion there is a real need for highly skilled people to help exploit this industry.  Under the envelope of game design we are able to study and research topics such as: real-time systems; probability theory; fuzzy logic; neural networks; genetic algorithms; reconfigurable computing; mobile wireless systems; and image analysis; to name but a few.

Mobile Commerce (M-Commerce) is the term applied to financial transactions and the electronic transfer of funds using a mobile device.  While Electronic Commerce is concerned with transactions over the internet, M-Commerce concentrates on the problems relating to the transmission of information across the much less secure air interface.  In this course we address the relation to the security and transfer mechanisms for financial transactions on mobile systems.  This area is again vital to the success of mobile systems as we must will give customers confidence in utilising mobile device for financial transactions and therefore forms an important component of this very unique degree.

The Department of Communication Systems at Lancaster has a very successful portfolio of Masters level courses in various aspects of Communications and has research activities in both the fundamentals principles of the course together and the specific areas of Mobile Games and
M-Commerce.  The course and facilities also benefit from sponsorship from Nokia.