Customer-engineer relationship management for converged ICT service companies

Thanks to the advent of converged communications services (often referred to as ‘triple play’), the next generation Service Engineer will need radically different skills, processes and tools from today’s counterpart. Why? in order to meet the challenges of installing and maintaining services based on multi-vendor software and hardware components in an IP-based network environment. The converged services environment is likely to be ‘smart’ and support flexible and dynamic interoperability between appliances and computing devices. These radical changes in the working environment will inevitably force managers to rethink the role of Service Engineers in relation to customer relationship management. This paper aims to identify requirements for an information system to support converged communications service engineers with regard to customer-engineer relationship management. Furthermore, an architecture for such a system is proposed and how it meets these requirements is discussed

Ring-modulator-based RoF system with local SSB modulation and remote carrier reuse

A full-duplex radio-over-fibre (RoF) system based on an integrated silicon ring modulator is proposed and demonstrated. For the downstream link, a coherent dual-wavelength laser source is coupled to a silicon ring modulator in the central office (CO). Since only one of the optical carriers in the dual-wavelength laser source is aligned to the resonance of the ring modulator, a single sideband (SSB) modulated optical downstream signal is obtained, which is able to combat the power fading introduced by the fibre dispersion. Besides, for the upstream link, the unmodulated optical carrier in the SSB-modulated optical downstream signal is reused by using an optical filter in the remote radio head. After being modulated by the upstream data, the optical upstream signal is transmitted back to the CO. A proof-of-concept experiment is carried out. Error vector magnitudes of 21-GHz downstream and 10-GHz upstream signals are measured, which confirms that the proposed architecture is a promising lowcost solution for future high-speed wireless communication systems

Internal report cluster 1: Urban freight innovations and solutions for sustainable deliveries (3/4)

Technical report about sustainable urban freight solutions, part 3 of

Single sign-on and authorization for dynamic virtual organizations

The vision of the Grid is to support the dynamic establishment and subsequent management of virtual organizations (VO). To achieve this presents many challenges for the Grid community with perhaps the greatest one being security. Whilst Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) provide a form of single sign-on through recognition of trusted certification authorities, they have numerous limitations. The Internet2 Shibboleth architecture and protocols provide an enabling technology overcoming some of the issues with PKIs however Shibboleth too suffers from various limitations that make its application for dynamic VO establishment and management difficult. In this paper we explore the limitations of PKIs and Shibboleth and present an infrastructure that incorporates single sign-on with advanced authorization of federated security infrastructures and yet is seamless and targeted to the needs of end users. We explore this infrastructure through an educational case study at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh

How Will Online Affiliate Marketing Networks Impact Search Engine Rankings?

In online affiliate marketing networks advertising web sites offer their affiliates revenues based on provided web site traffic and associated leads and sales. Advertising web sites can have a network of thousands of affiliates providing them with web site traffic through hyperlinks on their web sites. Search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo, consider hyperlinks as a proof of quality and/or reliability of the linked web sites, and therefore use them to determine the relevance of web sites with regard to search queries. In this research we investigate the potential impact of online affiliate marketing networks on the ranking of advertisers’ web sites in search results. This article empirically explores how seven different affiliate marketing networks affect the rankings of the advertising web sites within web search engines. The field study followed intensively seven online affiliate marketing networks for twelve weeks after their launch. The results indicate that newly started affiliate networks effectively improve the rankings of advertising web sites in search engine results. Also, it was found that the effects of affiliate marketing networks on search engine rankings were smaller for advertising web sites operating in highly competitive markets. Another finding was that a growth in visitors coming from search engines was present as a result of the improvement of search engine rankings. Finally, the results indicate that cost-benefit metrics associated with affiliate marketing programs, such as the average marketing cost will decrease when the positive effects of affiliate marketing on search engine rankings are taken into account.Advertising;Hyperlinks;Online Affiliate Marketing Networks;Search Engine Rankings

Massive MIMO with Non-Ideal Arbitrary Arrays: Hardware Scaling Laws and Circuit-Aware Design

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are cellular networks where the base stations (BSs) are equipped with unconventionally many antennas, deployed on co-located or distributed arrays. Huge spatial degrees-of-freedom are achieved by coherent processing over these massive arrays, which provide strong signal gains, resilience to imperfect channel knowledge, and low interference. This comes at the price of more infrastructure; the hardware cost and circuit power consumption scale linearly/affinely with the number of BS antennas $N$. Hence, the key to cost-efficient deployment of large arrays is low-cost antenna branches with low circuit power, in contrast to today's conventional expensive and power-hungry BS antenna branches. Such low-cost transceivers are prone to hardware imperfections, but it has been conjectured that the huge degrees-of-freedom would bring robustness to such imperfections. We prove this claim for a generalized uplink system with multiplicative phase-drifts, additive distortion noise, and noise amplification. Specifically, we derive closed-form expressions for the user rates and a scaling law that shows how fast the hardware imperfections can increase with $N$ while maintaining high rates. The connection between this scaling law and the power consumption of different transceiver circuits is rigorously exemplified. This reveals that one can make the circuit power increase as $\sqrt{N}$, instead of linearly, by careful circuit-aware system design.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 16 pages, 8 figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code: https://github.com/emilbjornson/hardware-scaling-law

Enterprise Business Models Leveraging Self-Sovereign Identity: Towards a User-Empowering Me2X Economy

The Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) paradigm aims to transition online identity silos exhibiting privacy issues to user-controlled sharing mechanisms. While various governments back and promote its development, business models often play a subordinate role in these efforts. Building on academic literature and practical projects, our study addresses this and contributes a taxonomy of business enabled by SSI with 12 dimensions, 9 sub-dimensions, and 51 characteristics