2,071 research outputs found
Analysis domain model for shared virtual environments
The field of shared virtual environments, which also
encompasses online games and social 3D environments, has a
system landscape consisting of multiple solutions that share great functional overlap. However, there is little system interoperability between the different solutions. A shared virtual environment has an associated problem domain that is highly complex raising difficult challenges to the development process, starting with the architectural design of the underlying system. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a broad domain analysis of shared virtual environments, which enables developers to have a better understanding of the whole rather than the part(s). The second contribution is a reference domain model for discussing and describing solutions - the Analysis Domain Model
Service Platform for Converged Interactive Broadband Broadcast and Cellular Wireless
A converged broadcast and telecommunication
service platform is presented that is able to create, deliver, and
manage interactive, multimedia content and services for consumption
on three different terminal types. The motivations of
service providers for designing converged interactive multimedia
services, which are crafted for their individual requirements, are
investigated. The overall design of the system is presented with
particular emphasis placed on the operational features of each
of the sub-systems, the flows of media and metadata through the
sub-systems and the formats and protocols required for inter-communication
between them. The key features of tools required for
creating converged interactive multimedia content for a range of
different end-user terminal types are examined. Finally possible
enhancements to this system are discussed. This study is of particular
interest to those organizations currently conducting trials
and commercial launches of DVB-H services because it provides
them with an insight of the various additional functions required
in the service provisioning platforms to provide fully interactive
services to a range of different mobile terminal types
SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks
The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying
cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to
offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management
costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework,
communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services,
providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services
function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC
services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner.
According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can
indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication
systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic
ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in
a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service
provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density
of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging
Telecommunications Technologie
Exploring traffic and QoS management mechanisms to support mobile cloud computing using service localisation in heterogeneous environments
In recent years, mobile devices have evolved to support an amalgam of multimedia applications and content. However, the small size of these devices poses a limit the amount of local computing resources. The emergence of Cloud technology has set the ground for an era of task offloading for mobile devices and we are now seeing the deployment of applications that make more extensive use of Cloud processing as a means of augmenting the capabilities of mobiles. Mobile Cloud Computing is the term used to describe the convergence of these technologies towards applications and mechanisms that offload tasks from mobile devices to the Cloud.
In order for mobile devices to access Cloud resources and successfully offload tasks there, a solution for constant and reliable connectivity is required. The proliferation of wireless technology ensures that networks are available almost everywhere in an urban environment and mobile devices can stay connected to a network at all times. However, user mobility is often the cause of intermittent connectivity that affects the performance of applications and ultimately degrades the user experience. 5th Generation Networks are introducing mechanisms that enable constant and reliable connectivity through seamless handovers between networks and provide the foundation for a tighter coupling between Cloud resources and mobiles.
This convergence of technologies creates new challenges in the areas of traffic management and QoS provisioning. The constant connectivity to and reliance of mobile devices on Cloud resources have the potential of creating large traffic flows between networks. Furthermore, depending on the type of application generating the traffic flow, very strict QoS may be required from the networks as suboptimal performance may severely degrade an applicationâs functionality.
In this thesis, I propose a new service delivery framework, centred on the convergence of Mobile Cloud Computing and 5G networks for the purpose of optimising service delivery in a mobile environment. The framework is used as a guideline for identifying different aspects of service delivery in a mobile environment and for providing a path for future research in this field. The focus of the thesis is placed on the service delivery mechanisms that are responsible for optimising the QoS and managing network traffic.
I present a solution for managing traffic through dynamic service localisation according to user mobility and device connectivity. I implement a prototype of the solution in a virtualised environment as a proof of concept and demonstrate the functionality and results gathered from experimentation.
Finally, I present a new approach to modelling network performance by taking into account user mobility. The model considers the overall performance of a persistent connection as the mobile node switches between different networks. Results from the model can be used to determine which networks will negatively affect application performance and what impact they will have for the duration of the user's movement. The proposed model is evaluated using an analytical approac
Time-bounded distributed QoS-aware service configuration in heterogeneous cooperative environments
The scarcity and diversity of resources among the devices of heterogeneous computing
environments may affect their ability to perform services with specific Quality
of Service constraints, particularly in dynamic distributed environments where the
characteristics of the computational load cannot always be predicted in advance.
Our work addresses this problem by allowing resource constrained devices to cooperate
with more powerful neighbour nodes, opportunistically taking advantage
of global distributed resources and processing power. Rather than assuming that
the dynamic configuration of this cooperative service executes until it computes
its optimal output, the paper proposes an anytime approach that has the ability
to tradeoff deliberation time for the quality of the solution. Extensive simulations
demonstrate that the proposed anytime algorithms are able to quickly find a good
initial solution and effectively optimise the rate at which the quality of the current
solution improves at each iteration, with an overhead that can be considered
negligible
- âŠ