When Cost-Efficient Technologies Meet Politics: A Case Study of Radical Wireless Network Implementation

Cost efficiency has been a dominant perspective in the traditional IT literature. However, in complex technology and business environment, the widely recognized cost efficient assumption of information technology has been increasingly challenged. Drawing from a case study of wireless network implementation situated in a politically sensitive workplace, this paper provided practice insights for IT managers in today’s networked economy. More specifically, stories experienced in the case study illustrated that despite well-calculated cost efficiency of wireless network infrastructure, the radical implementation process in the case organization encountered enormous challenges and opposition due to the fact that administrators failed to consider various stakeholders’ positions and interests. Eventually, the implementation objectives and outcome were considerably undermined. Implications from this empirical case research reemphasized the significance of understanding political forces situated in any business environment where different stakeholders hold conflicting interests. Lessons learned from the case story further encouraged IT managers and policy makers to better strategize emerging information technology in general and wireless networks in particular as the whole global society and business environment are increasingly facing an emerging wireless world

Network Neutrality: A Research Guide

The conclusion in a research handbook should emphasise the complexity of the problem than trying to claim a one-size-fits-all solution. I have categorised net neutrality into positive and negative (content discrimination) net neutrality indicating the latter as potentially harmful. Blocking content without informing customers appropriately is wrong: if it says ‘Internet service’, it should offer an open Internet (alongside walled gardens if that is expressly advertised as such). The issue of uncontrolled Internet flows versus engineered solutions is central to the question of a ‘free’ versus regulated Internet. A consumer- and citizen-orientated intervention depends on passing regulations to prevent unregulated nontransparent controls exerted over traffic via DPI equipment, whether imposed by ISPs for financial advantage or by governments eager to use this new technology to filter, censor and enforce copyright against their citizens. Unraveling the previous ISP limited liability regime risks removing the efficiency of that approach in permitting the free flow of information for economic and social advantage. These conclusions support a light-touch regulatory regime involving reporting requirements and co-regulation with, as far as is possible, market-based solutions. Solutions may be international as well as local, and international coordination of best practice and knowledge will enable national regulators to keep up with the technology ‘arms race’

Development of a Novel Media-independent Communication Theology for Accessing Local & Web-based Data: Case Study with Robotic Subsystems

Realizing media independence in today’s communication system remains an open problem by and large. Information retrieval, mostly through the Internet, is becoming the most demanding feature in technological progress and this web-based data access should ideally be in user-selective form. While blind-folded access of data through the World Wide Web is quite streamlined, the counter-half of the facet, namely, seamless access of information database pertaining to a specific end-device, e.g. robotic systems, is still in a formative stage. This paradigm of access as well as systematic query-based retrieval of data, related to the physical enddevice is very crucial in designing the Internet-based network control of the same in real-time. Moreover, this control of the end-device is directly linked up to the characteristics of three coupled metrics, namely, ‘multiple databases’, ‘multiple servers’ and ‘multiple inputs’ (to each server). This triad, viz. database-input-server (DIS) plays a significant role in overall performance of the system, the background details of which is still very sketchy in global research community. This work addresses the technical issues associated with this theology, with specific reference to formalism of a customized DIS considering real-time delay analysis. The present paper delineates the developmental paradigms of novel multi-input multioutput communication semantics for retrieving web-based information from physical devices, namely, two representative robotic sub-systems in a coherent and homogeneous mode. The developed protocol can be entrusted for use in real-time in a complete user-friendly manner

Ensuring interoperability between network elements in next generation networks

Next Generation Networks (NGNs), based on the Internet Protocol (IP), implement several services such as IP-based telephony and are beginning to replace the classic telephony systems. Due to the development and implementation of new powerful services these systems are becoming increasingly complex. Implementing these new services (typically software-based network elements) is often accompanied by unexpected and erratic behaviours which can manifest as interoperability problems. The reason for this caused by insufficient testing at the developing companies. The testing of such products is by nature a costly and time-consuming exercise and therefore cut down to what is considered the maximum acceptable level. Ensuring the interoperability between network elements is a known challenge. However, there exists no concept of which testing methods should be utilised to achieve an acceptable level of quality. The objective of this thesis was to improve the interoperability between network elements in NGNs by creating a testing scheme comprising of three diverse testing methods: conformance testing, interoperability testing and posthoc analysis. In the first project a novel conformance testing methodology for developing sets of conformance test cases for service specifications in NGNs was proposed. This methodology significantly improves the chance of interoperability and provides a considerable enhancement to the currently used interoperability tests. It was evaluated by successfully applying it to the Presence Service. The second report proposed a post-hoc methodology which enables the identification of the ultimate causes for interoperability problems in a NGN in daily operation. The new methods were implemented in the tool IMPACT (IP-Based Multi Protocol Posthoc Analyzer and Conformance Tester), which stores all exchanged messages between network elements in a database. Using SQL queries, the causes for errors can be found efficiently. Overall the presented testing scheme improves significantly the chance that network elements interoperate successfully by providing new methods. Beyond that, the quality of the software product is raised by mapping these methods to phases in a process model and providing well defined steps on which test method is the best suited at a certain stage

Objective Measurement of Speech Quality in VoIP over Wireless LAN during Handoff

Quality of Service is a very important factor to determine the quality of a VoIP call. Different subjective and objective models exist for evaluating the speech quality in VoIP. E-model is one of the objective methods of measuring the speech quality; it considers various factors like packet loss, delay and codec impairments. The calculations of Emodel are not very accurate in case of handovers – when a VoIP call moves from one wireless LAN to another. This project conducted experimental evaluation of performance of E-model during handovers and proposes a new approach to accurately calculate the speech quality of VoIP during handovers. A detailed description of the experimental setup and the comparison of the new approach with E-model is presented in this report