Exploiting contextual handover information for versatile services in NGN environments.

Users in ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments will be much more empowered in ways to access and to control their navigation. Handover, the vital event in which a user changes the attachment point in a Next Generation Network (NGN), is an important occasion and the conditions and environment in which it is executed can offer relevant information for businesses. This paper describes the capabilities of a platform which intends to exploit contextual handover information offering a rich environment that can be used by access and content providers for building innovative context-aware multi-provided services. Based on ontologies, the technique not only eases the building of versatile services but also provides a comprehensive source of information both for enriching user navigation in the network as well as for the improvement of the provider’s relationship with their customers

Information for handover management in heterogeneous networks: data representation,languages and integrated platforms

Due to the convergence of radio, television, telephony and Internet areas, the mobility of users, the ubiquity of services, and the development of new technologies to unify access provision, the interaction between providers and users will be required for access on demand in heterogeneous environments. This interaction should allow, in addition to seamless handovers, the negotiation based on technical requirements and user's desires during handover decision processes. The central part of the information being exchanged between the access provider's attachment points and user's devices should be a uniform and common structure that models the handover management information, in terms of what the information represents their semantic meanings and relationships. This work presents a set of ontologies, for this purpose, employed during handover decision processes, in integrated networking platforms for access on demand. A case study is presented, which demonstrates how a service could be integrated in two different platforms for such environment

Collaborative Traffic Offloading for Mobile Systems

Due to the popularity of smartphones and mobile streaming services, the growth of traffic volume in mobile networks is phenomenal. This leads to huge investment pressure on mobile operators' wireless access and core infrastructure, while the profits do not necessarily grow at the same pace. As a result, it is urgent to find a cost-effective solution that can scale to the ever increasing traffic volume generated by mobile systems. Among many visions, mobile traffic offloading is regarded as a promising mechanism by using complementary wireless communication technologies, such as WiFi, to offload data traffic away from the overloaded mobile networks. The current trend to equip mobile devices with an additional WiFi interface also supports this vision. This dissertation presents a novel collaborative architecture for mobile traffic offloading that can efficiently utilize the context and resources from networks and end systems. The main contributions include a network-assisted offloading framework, a collaborative system design for energy-aware offloading, and a software-defined networking (SDN) based offloading platform. Our work is the first in this domain to integrate energy and context awareness into mobile traffic offloading from an architectural perspective. We have conducted extensive measurements on mobile systems to identify hidden issues of traffic offloading in the operational networks. We implement the offloading protocol in the Linux kernel and develop our energy-aware offloading framework in C++ and Java on commodity machines and smartphones. Our prototype systems for mobile traffic offloading have been tested in a live environment. The experimental results suggest that our collaborative architecture is feasible and provides reasonable improvement in terms of energy saving and offloading efficiency. We further adopt the programmable paradigm of SDN to enhance the extensibility and deployability of our proposals. We release the SDN-based platform under open-source licenses to encourage future collaboration with research community and standards developing organizations. As one of the pioneering work, our research stresses the importance of collaboration in mobile traffic offloading. The lessons learned from our protocol design, system development, and network experiments shed light on future research and development in this domain.Yksi mobiiliverkkojen suurimmista haasteista liittyy liikennemäärien eksponentiaaliseen kasvuun. Tämä verkkoliikenteen kasvu johtuu pitkälti suosituista videopalveluista, kuten YouTube ja Netflix, jotka lähettävät liikkuvaa kuvaa verkon yli. Verkon lisääntynyt kuormitus vaatii investointeja verkon laajentamiseksi. On tärkeää löytää kustannustehokkaita tapoja välittää suuressa mittakaavassa sisältöä ilman mittavia infrastruktuuri-investointeja. Erilaisia liikennekuormien ohjausmenetelmiä on ehdotettu ratkaisuksi sisällönvälityksen tehostamiseen mobiiliverkoissa. Näissä ratkaisuissa hyödynnetään toisiaan tukevia langattomia teknologioita tiedonvälityksen tehostamiseen, esimerkiksi LTE-verkosta voidaan delegoida tiedonvälitystä WiFi-verkoille. Useimmissa kannettavissa laitteissa on tuki useammalle langattomalle tekniikalle, joten on luonnollista hyödyntää näiden tarjoamia mahdollisuuksia tiedonvälityksen tehostamisessa. Tässä väitöskirjassa tutkitaan liikennekuormien ohjauksen toimintaa ja mahdollisuuksia mobiiliverkoissa. Työssä esitetään uusi yhteistyöpohjainen liikennekuormien ohjausjärjestelmä, joka hyödyntää päätelaitteiden ja verkon tilannetietoa liikennekuormien optimoinnissa. Esitetty järjestelmä ja arkkitehtuuri on ensimmäinen, joka yhdistää energiankulutuksen ja kontekstitiedon liikennekuormien ohjaukseen. Väitöskirjan keskeisiä tuloksia ovat verkon tukema liikennekuormien ohjauskehikko, yhteistyöpohjainen energiatietoinen optimointiratkaisu sekä avoimen lähdekoodin SoftOffload-ratkaisu, joka mahdollistaa ohjelmistopohjaisen liikennekuormien ohjauksen. Esitettyjä järjestelmiä arvioidaan kokeellisesti kaupunkiympäristöissä älypuhelimia käyttäen. Työn tulokset mahdollistavat entistä energiatehokkaammat liikennekuormien ohjausratkaisut ja tarjoavat ideoita ja lähtökohtia tulevaan 5G kehitystyöhön

Intelligent Circuits and Systems

ICICS-2020 is the third conference initiated by the School of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at Lovely Professional University that explored recent innovations of researchers working for the development of smart and green technologies in the fields of Energy, Electronics, Communications, Computers, and Control. ICICS provides innovators to identify new opportunities for the social and economic benefits of society.　 This conference bridges the gap between academics and R&D institutions, social visionaries, and experts from all strata of society to present their ongoing research activities and foster research relations between them. It provides opportunities for the exchange of new ideas, applications, and experiences in the field of smart technologies and finding global partners for future collaboration. The ICICS-2020 was conducted in two broad categories, Intelligent Circuits & Intelligent Systems and Emerging Technologies in Electrical Engineering

Privacy in location-based services

Während der letzten Jahre erfuhren mobile Geräte durch grössere Speicher, der Entwicklung schnellerer Prozessoren und höherer Übertragungsraten, um nur einige der wichtigsten Performanceparameter zu nennen, einen enormen Entwicklungsschub. Gleichzeitig sind die unterschiedlichen Positionierungssysteme mittlerweile ausgereift und klein genug, um in mobile Geräte verbaut werden zu können. Erst durch die Möglichkeit der Zusammenführung von solchen ausgereiften Positionierungs- mit existierenden Telekommunikationstechnologien kann die Basis für eine neue Generation kontextsensitiver Anwendungen und entsprechender Geschaeftsmodelle geschaffen werden. Abgesehen von den technischen Massnahmen die zum Schutz gegen Attacken, Verfaelschungen und Missbrauch sensitiver Daten eingesetzt werden, müssen diese auch allen rechtlichen Aspekten und Rahmenbedingungen von Telekommunikationssystemen entsprechen. In diesem Sinne muss das Ziel von Forschungen im Bereich neuer kontext-sensitiver Systeme und Anwendungen die mit Positionsdaten operieren der Schutz der Privatheit jedes einzelnen Nutzers sein. Diese Dissertation beginnt mit einer Diskussion über verschiedene Aspekte von Location-Based Systemen. Es werden weiters unterschiedliche Anforderungen aufgezeigt deren Erfüllung notwendig sind, um flexible Systeme anbieten zu können und die zudem den Schutz der Privatheit der Nutzer garantieren können. Der wohl wichtigste Beitrag dazu ist ein Mechanismus der auf dem Begriff des Pseudonyms basiert.Dieses Verfahren garantiert maximale Sicherheit und Schutz der Privatheit der Benutzer während der Nutzung von Diensten. Der zweite Beitrag der Dissertation ist eine Telekom Service Architektur die den erwähnten Pseudonym-basierten Mechanismus integriert. Durch Einbeziehen dedizierter Dienste von Telekommunikationsanbietern bildet diese Architektur die Basis für die Realisierung neuer Geschäftsmodelle und ermöglicht die Implementierung des pay-as-you-go Konzeptes. Dieses ermöglicht Kunden anonym mobile Dienste von Drittanbietern zu konsumieren, ähnlich dem anonymen Kauf von Gütern mit realem Geld. Schliesslich wird mit der Implementierung einer Service Platform sowohl die Funktionsweise des Pseudonym Mechanismus sowie die Interaktionen der in der System Architektur vorgesehenen Dienste und Komponenten die zur Realisierung von Location-Based Anwendungen benötigt werden demonstriert.During the last years the development of mobile devices has gained significant progress with respect to memory capabilities, advanced processing power and higher transfer rates to name only a few performance parameters. At the same time eclectic positioning and localization technologies are meanwhile mature enough to be integrated into mobile devices. Not until positioning, localization and telecommunication technologies can be combined, seamlessly the basis for the proliferation of a new generation of context-aware applications and business models can be build. In this respect, location and position information foster novel future context-awareapplications. But, if this information is in the wrong hands such applications may by the same token pose severe threat. Therefore, apart from technical means against attacks, forgery and misuse of sensitive user information the interaction of all these systems must comply with legal requirements that precisely prescribe all aspects of telecommunication systems. In this spirit, the main research ob jective addressed for the design of new context- aware and location-based systems must be the protection of the user’s privacy. This dissertation discusses first various aspects of location-based systems and out of it the various needs that have to be addressed to be able to provide flexible location-based services to mobile users by preserving privacy. The main contribution of this work is a mechanism that is based on the notion of pseudonyms. The use of this kind of pseudonyms provides maximum security and privacy for users during communication. The second contribution is a telecommunication service architecture that is tightly coupled with the pseudonym mechanism. It allows new business models to be applied by leveraging the use of some services of the telcos’ infrastructure. This service application further allows the implementation of the so called pay-as-you-go concept. This allows customers to anonymously consume mobile services that are offered by third party application providers similarly to buying physical goods with cash. Finally, we demonstrate the implementation of a service platform that allows us to illustrate the operation of the pseudonym mechanism and the interworking of the system architecture’s components that are tailored for the realization of location-based applications

Enabling Things to Talk

Information Systems Applications (incl. Internet); Business IT Infrastructure; Computer Appl. in Administrative Data Processing; Operations Management; Software Engineering; Special Purpose and Application-Based Systems; Business Information Systems; Ubiquitous Computing; Reference Architecture; Spatio-Temporal Systems; Smart Objects; Supply Chain Management; IoT; SCM; Web Applications; Internet of Things; Smart Homes; RFI