Femto Cells: Current Status and Future Directions

This is a survey paper on the recently developed and rapidly evolving field of femtocells. Quite often, it is noticed that cell-phone signals are strongly attenuated, when indoors, leading to call dropping or poor call quality. Femtocells are mini base stations that are deployed in users’ homes so that the user can directly connect to the cellular network through the femtocell instead of the outdoor macrocell, thereby increasing call quality. In the later stages of the paper, we also discuss the integration of the femtocell into the 3G architecture, as well as the various interference issues that the femtocell faces

Intent-driven reasoning priorities in a feature-based validation system

Feature-based representation validation seeks to find means to verify feature-based representations in order to guarantee that feature's expected behaviours are met and that applications that use the representation can be sure of the correctness of the feature-related data. To achieve this, a clear definition of features and their behaviour is needed but cannot be found in the literature. Instead of proposing yet another feature definition, an attempt was made to define some basic common-sense characteristics for (prismatic) features that could be tested, analysed and manipulated. These characteristics are called Intents because features are said to be the carriers of designer's intents. Feature-based Designer's Intents (DI's) proved to be essential to the validation framework because they define the scope of the Feature-based Modelling (FBM) utilisation. Also, some DI's establish clearly the geometric-dependent behaviour of features and were found to be closely related to validation. A prototype system called FRIEND, an acronym to Feature-based Reasoning system for Intent-driven ENgineering Design, was implemented to perform feature-based representation validation. This paper details Designer's Intents (DI's) in the context of deign-by-feature representation validation, presents Morphological Functional and Volumetrical DI's, their semantics and their priority organisation inside the validation mechanism, as it was implemented within FRIEND

Feature-based designer's intents

Feature-based modelling is considered an improvement on existing CAD systems. Features are considered to be a medium that carries designer’s intents, but neither features nor designer’s intent have widely accepted definitions. Morphological functional designer’s intents, defined as common-sense behaviours of the (form) feature’s concept, have been defined and presented within a feature-based representation validation system [4]. The process of “feature elicitation”, frequently implied to identify and categorise features, comprises “featurization” and “featurization validation” processes which help specify an appropriate feature library to be used in a particular application. In the research reported here a similar approach, called “intent elicitation”, has been performed to identify and categorise meaningful and measurable designer’s intents from the integrated CAD/CAM and Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP) domains. The resulting classification and taxonomy is presented in this paper. It can be observed that the classification encompasses morphological feature-based designer’s intents (FbDI’s), because of the feature’s concept, and is application dependent. The identified FbDI’s have been used in a feature-based reasoning system which has led to an intent-driven approach for feature-based modelling where designer’s intents are an explicit and central aspect

RF Sounding: Generating Sounds from Radio Frequencies

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Docitive Networks. A Step Beyond Cognition

Projecte fet en col.laboració amb Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de CatalunyaCatalà: En les Xarxes Docents es por ta més enllà la idea d'elaborar decisions intel ligents. Per mitjà de compartir informació entre els nodes, amb l'objectiu primordial de reduir la complexitat i millorar el rendiment de les Xarxes Cognitives. Per a això es revisen alguns conceptes importants de les bases de l'Aprenentatge Automàtic, prestant especial atenció a l'aprenentatge per reforç. També es fa una visió de la Teoria de Jocs Evolutius i de la dinàmica de rèpliques. Finalment, simulacions ,basades en el projecte TIC-BUNGEE, es mostren per validar els conceptes introduïts.Castellano: Las Redes Docentes llevan más alla la idea de elaborar decisiones inteligentes, por medio de compartir información entre los nodos, con el objetivo primordial de reducir la complejidad y mejorar el rendimiento de las Redes Cognitiva. Para ello se revisan algunos conceptos importantes de las bases del Aprendizaje Automático, prestando especial atencion al aprendizaje por refuerzo, también damos una visón de la Teoría de Juegos Evolutivos y de la replicación de dinamicas. Por último, las simulaciones basadas en el proyecto TIC-BUNGEE se muestran para validar los conceptos introducidos.English: The Docitive Networks further use the idea of drawing intelligent decisions by means of sharing information between nodes with the prime aim of reduce complexity and enhance performance of Congnitive Networks. To this end we review some important concepts form Machine Learning, paying special atention to Reinforcement Learning, we also go insight Evolutionary Game Theory and Replicator Dynamics. Finally, simulations Based on ICT-BUNGEE project are shown to validate the introduced concepts

Common Radio Resource Management: Joint Call Admission Control And Traffic Offloading Method

The concept of Common Radio Resource Management (CRRM) has been proposed by 3GPP in order to efficiently manage the common pool of radio resources that are available for each of the existing radio access technologies in the heterogeneous wireless networks (HWNs). The main challenge of CRRM for HWNs is to search the best connection for the demanded services, enabling calls transference from one interface to another seamlessly and utilizing the availability of all radio resources. Thus, this thesis proposes a joint call admission control (JCAC) and traffic offloading algorithms in the CRRM for an integrated cellular and mobile network. The contributions of this work are threefold. First, a user mobility model in the wireless overlay network is proposed

3G migration in Pakistan

The telecommunication industry in Pakistan has come a long way since the country\u27s independence in 1947. The initial era could be fairly termed as the PTCL (Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited) monopoly, for it was the sole provider of all telecommunication services across the country. It was not until four decades later that the region embarked into the new world of wireless communication, hence ending the decades old PTCL monopoly. By the end of the late 1990\u27s, government support and international investment in the region opened new doors to innovation and better quality, low cost, healthy competition. Wireless licenses for the private sector in the telecommunication industry triggered a promising chain of events that resulted in a drastic change in the telecommunication infrastructure and service profile. The newly introduced wireless (GSM) technology received enormous support from all stakeholders (consumers, regulatory body, and market) and caused a vital boost in Pakistan\u27s economy. Numerous tangential elements had triggered this vital move in the history of telecommunications in Pakistan. Entrepreneurs intended to test the idea of global joint ventures in the East and hence the idea of international business became a reality. The technology had proven to be a great success in the West, while Pakistan\u27s telecom consumer had lived under the shadow of PTCL dominance for decades and needed more flexibility. At last the world was moving from wired to wireless! Analysts termed this move as the beginning of a new era. The investors, telecommunication businesses, and Pakistani treasury prospered. It was a win-win situation for all involved. The learning curve was steep for both operators and consumers but certainly improved over time. In essence, the principle of deploying the right technology in the right market at the right time led to this remarkable success. The industry today stands on the brink of a similar crossroads via transition from second generation to something beyond. With the partial success of 3G in Europe and the USA, the government has announced the release of three 3G licenses by mid 2009. This decision is not yet fully supported by all but still initiated parallel efforts by the operators and the vendors to integrate this next move into their existing infrastructure

A Survey on Security for Mobile Devices

Nowadays, mobile devices are an important part of our everyday lives since they enable us to access a large variety of ubiquitous services. In recent years, the availability of these ubiquitous and mobile services has signicantly increased due to the dierent form of connectivity provided by mobile devices, such as GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. In the same trend, the number and typologies of vulnerabilities exploiting these services and communication channels have increased as well. Therefore, smartphones may now represent an ideal target for malware writers. As the number of vulnerabilities and, hence, of attacks increase, there has been a corresponding rise of security solutions proposed by researchers. Due to the fact that this research eld is immature and still unexplored in depth, with this paper we aim to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of the research on security solutions for mobile devices. This paper surveys the state of the art on threats, vulnerabilities and security solutions over the period 2004-2011. We focus on high-level attacks, such those to user applications, through SMS/MMS, denial-of-service, overcharging and privacy. We group existing approaches aimed at protecting mobile devices against these classes of attacks into dierent categories, based upon the detection principles, architectures, collected data and operating systems, especially focusing on IDS-based models and tools. With this categorization we aim to provide an easy and concise view of the underlying model adopted by each approach

QoS Abstraction Layer in 4G Access Networks

Tese de Mestrado. Redes e Serviços de Comunicação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200