Feasibility Study of USB Emulator Support on Symbian OS

Symbian Operating System is one of the best modern operating systems designed for data enabled mobile devices. Although Symbian OS software finally runs on various mobile devices, most Symbian OS software is developed first on the emulator. The emulator provides a full target environment, which runs under Windows on a PC. It enables development to be substantially PC-based, only the final development stages focus on the target hardware. This advances fast, efficient and cost-saving Symbian software development cycle. Because of various reasons, such as limited development resources and time, currently Symbian USB software can only be tested on target hardware. This has causes variant kinds of problems to USB development and test. The demand of USB emulator support has been significantly increased, as the USB has become more and more important and profitable feature in S60. In order to take the advantages of the emulator, and ease the developing and testing efforts, USB emulator support is highly required. Due to the technology distinctions and historical reasons, implementing USB support to the emulator running on PC is not as trivial as implementing the emulator support for some other communications methods, such as IR or RS-232. This thesis is aimed at studying the feasible solutions of USB emulator support on Symbianx,OS, and evaluates them from different perspectives. In this thesis, the USB technology and Symbian OS are studied in general. The objective is to find out the feasible solutions, identify the relevant stakeholders and find their concerns, and evaluate the solutions by measuring how well the solution addresses the concerns. A literature study is conducted to find the necessary knowledge about the problem domain. Symbian Infrared emulator support is studies to establish a ground for comparison and demonstrate an example of implementation. Stakeholders are interviewed to gather the information relating to USB emulator support. This information is used as the base criteria to evaluate the feasible solutions