The Digital Stadium

Major sports events are ideal opportunities to exploit pervasive computing technologies to increase the quality of experience. As the penetration of smartphones continue, the customer can become the hub of their experience, linked to their ticket, their seat, their favourite food offerings, their modes of transport, and most importantly, to the sporting event on show. But there are many challenges to connecting everything inside the stadium. The numbers and density of people make it difficult to provide adequate bandwidth, which when combined with the concrete and steel construction of the stadium make network provision a serious technical challenge.

We propose to investigate the feasibility of connecting customers through a pocket switched network (PSN) to supplement existing network infra-structure, using the crowd's smartphones to build a mesh network to provide the dense coverage needed to make an Internet of Things a reality in the stadium. Delay tolerant protocols based on social interactions have been widely examined in research, but we believe that this would be one of the first deployments, allowing the validation of the underpinning ideas. This would also provide the first opportunity to investigate which services can be provided that customers want and how we can ensure that users' privacy concerns are met, given data travels over third party phones. Having answered these questions in our feasibility study, we will deploy and test the infra-structure and selected applications over a number of matches within Brighton and Hove Albion's Amex Community Stadium.

This project is the epitomy of a New Economic Model project, working with stakeholders to develop viable ways to build services over novel networking technologies.

This project is designed around the idea of impact on business. The deployment will occur in a very public "in the wild" setting, at the Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club stadium, with supporters attending matches as the user base. The services developed will be driven by both commercial considerations and user experience as well in order to provide both academic outputs situated in real world data and business benefit through improved marketing opportunities and supporter experience.

If successful this type of application has the potential for widespread applicability: in many stadium events and large public gatherings, including sports, music, spectacles and disaster situations. The proposed research outcomes include data and improvements to simulators in order to allow the feasibility of the system to a range of venues, crowds and application usage patterns to be studied. This analysis will inform future commercial exploitation beyond the grant -- however, the challenges presented are by no means unique to the particular setting we consider here.

Talks are underway between the stakeholders about how to proceed with exploitation of the technology if the project is successful. It is likely that a spin-off company will be formed to market and license the technology, initially to other football clubs within this country, but eventually to other stadia and events around the world. If successful, the technology will create a niche market for digital companies in creating context specific services.

Given the popularity of football, such a project should be of great interest to the press and other media. We will be working with the University's and BHAFC's press office to maximise publicity, emphasising the academic lineage of such opportunistic networks and the funding from the EPSRC.