Building Programmable Wireless Networks: An Architectural Survey

In recent times, there have been a lot of efforts for improving the ossified Internet architecture in a bid to sustain unstinted growth and innovation. A major reason for the perceived architectural ossification is the lack of ability to program the network as a system. This situation has resulted partly from historical decisions in the original Internet design which emphasized decentralized network operations through co-located data and control planes on each network device. The situation for wireless networks is no different resulting in a lot of complexity and a plethora of largely incompatible wireless technologies. The emergence of "programmable wireless networks", that allow greater flexibility, ease of management and configurability, is a step in the right direction to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings of the wireless networks. In this paper, we provide a broad overview of the architectures proposed in literature for building programmable wireless networks focusing primarily on three popular techniques, i.e., software defined networks, cognitive radio networks, and virtualized networks. This survey is a self-contained tutorial on these techniques and its applications. We also discuss the opportunities and challenges in building next-generation programmable wireless networks and identify open research issues and future research directions.Comment: 19 page

From classroom to real word: Researching into how Chinese as a Foreign Language beginner learners use Social Networking technology to develop intercultural communicative competence in UK secondary schools

This research aimed to explore the teaching and learning of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in a Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) context and to understand how social networking (SN) technology can contribute to CFL beginner learners’ ICC development. The research involved a longitudinal exploratory case study (2015-2017), in which the case was a single General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) Mandarin class and the participants consisted of nine CFL beginner learners in a comprehensive secondary school in the Midlands of the UK. The research question focuses on how CFL beginner learners used social networking technology to develop their ICC and to communicate with their language partners from a link school in China. The research was carried out in the interpretive tradition in that it sought a rich and detailed understanding of the case by examining aspects of it in depth. This exploratory case study was intended to provide a trustworthy and transparent account of CFL learners’ use of social networking tools around genuine communication in Chinese. The focus of the study was to explore how a group of GCSE Mandarin students’ use of social networking technology contributed to their ICC development in a collaborative Community of Inquiry learning environment. Methods of data collection included participant observation, field notes, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews with students. The Community of Inquiry analysis framework (Garrison et al., 2000) and Byram’s (1997) ICC model were used as the base of the analysis of students’ online exchange and intercultural communication. The findings of this case study showed that Social Presence was the category of presence most often identified in the current Community of Inquiry created by GCSE Mandarin learners, followed by Cognitive Presence, and then Teaching Presence. The use of social networking technology was motivating and solved real-life problems (i.e. exchange visits). The intercultural tasks II in this exchange project promoted purposeful communication which generated unplanned topics on real-life events that were of interest to participants. The multimodal affordances of social networking tools played a crucial role in participants’ continuous participation and increased motivation in a Community of Inquiry. The informal characteristic of online conversation in this case study was in line with the “third place” concept, and non-linguistic features of social networking tools contributed to participants’ intercultural experience and ICC development. It is argued that translanguaging and collaborative learning in a Community of Inquiry could be a practical and useful approach to enable CFL beginner learners to become comfortable using the target language step by step while exploring the intercultural aspects of the target culture and community. In terms of GCSE Mandarin academic skills, the group of participants reported that they developed Mandarin writing and reading skills more than speaking and listening skills by using social networking technology. To conclude, social networking tools could help to create a Community of Inquiry where CFL beginner learners can develop real-world intercultural communicative competence through collaboration and exchange with language partners to become globally competent “intercultural speakers” (OECD, 2018)

The Quest for a Killer App for Opportunistic and Delay Tolerant Networks (Invited Paper)

Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) has attracted a lot of attention from the research community in recent years. Much work have been done regarding network architectures and algorithms for routing and forwarding in such networks. At the same time as many show enthusiasm for this exciting new research area there are also many sceptics, who question the usefulness of research in this area. In the past, we have seen other research areas become over-hyped and later die out as there was no killer app for them that made them useful in real scenarios. Real deployments of DTN systems have so far mostly been limited to a few niche scenarios, where they have been done as proof-of-concept field tests in research projects. In this paper, we embark upon a quest to find out what characterizes a potential killer applications for DTNs. Are there applications and situations where DTNs provide services that could not be achieved otherwise, or have potential to do it in a better way than other techniques? Further, we highlight some of the main challenges that needs to be solved to realize these applications and make DTNs a part of the mainstream network landscape

Cities Online: Urban Development and the Internet

Examines how institutions in Austin, Texas; Cleveland, Ohio; Nashville, Tennessee; Portland, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., are adapting to the Internet as an economic development and community building tool

DIY networking as a facilitator for interdisciplinary research on the hybrid city

DIY networking is a technology with special characteristics compared to the public Internet, which holds a unique potential for empowering citizens to shape their hybrid urban space toward conviviality and collective awareness. It can also play the role of a “boundary object” for facilitating interdisciplinary interactions and participatory processes between different actors: researchers, engineers, practitioners, artists, designers, local authorities, and activists. This position paper presents a social learning framework, the DIY networking paradigm, that we aim to put in the centre of the hybrid space design process. We first introduce our individual views on the role of design as discussed in the fields of engineering, urban planning, urban interaction design, design research, and community informatics. We then introduce a simple methodology for combining these diverse perspectives into a meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration, through a series of related events with different structure and framing. We conclude with a short summary of a selection of these events, which serves also as an introduction to the CONTACT workshop on facilitating information sharing between strangers, in the context of the Hybrid City III conference