Performance Analysis of Satellite Payload Architectures for Mobile Services

YesThis paper is concerned with the effects on the network performance of moving parts of what is considered traditionally to belong to the ground segment to on board the satellite. Initially, an overview of geostationary satellite communication systems and payload technology is presented, followed by a description of the network architecture and protocols that are the basis of the simulation models. The results obtained from this testbed are presented before concluding with a discussion of the results obtained

Baseband analog front-end and digital back-end for reconfigurable multi-standard terminals

Multimedia applications are driving wireless network operators to add high-speed data services such as Edge (E-GPRS), WCDMA (UMTS) and WLAN (IEEE 802.11a,b,g) to the existing GSM network. This creates the need for multi-mode cellular handsets that support a wide range of communication standards, each with a different RF frequency, signal bandwidth, modulation scheme etc. This in turn generates several design challenges for the analog and digital building blocks of the physical layer. In addition to the above-mentioned protocols, mobile devices often include Bluetooth, GPS, FM-radio and TV services that can work concurrently with data and voice communication. Multi-mode, multi-band, and multi-standard mobile terminals must satisfy all these different requirements. Sharing and/or switching transceiver building blocks in these handsets is mandatory in order to extend battery life and/or reduce cost. Only adaptive circuits that are able to reconfigure themselves within the handover time can meet the design requirements of a single receiver or transmitter covering all the different standards while ensuring seamless inter-interoperability. This paper presents analog and digital base-band circuits that are able to support GSM (with Edge), WCDMA (UMTS), WLAN and Bluetooth using reconfigurable building blocks. The blocks can trade off power consumption for performance on the fly, depending on the standard to be supported and the required QoS (Quality of Service) leve

Teaching protocol exchanges over cellular air interface

International audienceThe evolutionary path taken by cellular standards to the current and future standards is incomplete without fully understanding the older standards. The comprehension of the GSM standard, specifically the procedures for protocols exchange over the air interface will help students understand radio resource allocation procedures in GPRS and UMTS, and will ultimately assist future communication engineers to be able to design and solve problems related to these cellular standards. In this paper we describe the novel architecture of our teaching software, developed and programmed in Java. We present all the user interfaces and show how it can be used to assist in teaching, by presenting how the Mobile station and the GSM/GPRS network exchange data frames over the air interface with their associated protocols. Finally the uniqueness of this teaching tool was proved from the stand point of our modular architecture

A proposed NFC payment application

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Near Field Communication (NFC) technology is based on a short range radio communication channel which enables users to exchange data between devices. With NFC technology, mobile services establish a contactless transaction system to make the payment methods easier for people. Although NFC mobile services have great potential for growth, they have raised several issues which have concerned the researches and prevented the adoption of this technology within societies. Reorganizing and describing what is required for the success of this technology have motivated us to extend the current NFC ecosystem models to accelerate the development of this business area. In this paper, we introduce a new NFC payment application, which is based on our previous “NFC Cloud Wallet” model [1] to demonstrate a reliable structure of NFC ecosystem. We also describe the step by step execution of the proposed protocol in order to carefully analyse the payment application and our main focus will be on the Mobile Network Operator (MNO) as the main player within the ecosystem

Platforms and Protocols for the Internet of Things

Building a general architecture for the Internet of Things (IoT) is a very complex task, exacerbated by the extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a system. In this paper, we identify the main blocks of a generic IoT architecture, describing their features and requirements, and analyze the most common approaches proposed in the literature for each block. In particular, we compare three of the most important communication technologies for IoT purposes, i.e., REST, MQTT, and AMQP, and we also analyze three IoT platforms: openHAB, Sentilo, and Parse. The analysis will prove the importance of adopting an integrated approach that jointly addresses several issues and is able to flexibly accommodate the requirements of the various elements of the system. We also discuss a use case which illustrates the design challenges and the choices to make when selecting which protocols and technologies to use

Vulnerabilities of signaling system number 7 (SS7) to cyber attacks and how to mitigate against these vulnerabilities.

As the mobile network subscriber base exponentially increases due to some attractive offerings such as anytime anywhere accessibility, seamless roaming, inexpensive handsets with sophisticated applications, and Internet connectivity, the mobile telecommunications network has now become the primary source of communication for not only business and pleasure, but also for the many life and mission critical services. This mass popularisation of telecommunications services has resulted in a heavily loaded Signaling System number 7 (SS7) signaling network which is used in Second and Third Generations (2G and 3G) mobile networks and is needed for call control and services such as caller identity, roaming, and for sending short message servirces. SS7 signaling has enjoyed remarkable popularity for providing acceptable voice quality with negligible connection delays, pos- sibly due to its circuit-switched heritage. However, the traditional SS7 networks are expensive to lease and to expand, hence to cater for the growing signaling demand and to provide the seamless interconnectivity between the SS7 and IP networks a new suite of protocols known as Signaling Transport (SIGTRAN) has been designed to carry SS7 signaling messages over IP. Due to the intersignaling between the circuit-switched and the packet-switched networks, the mo- bile networks have now left the “walled garden”, which is a privileged, closed and isolated ecosystem under the full control of mobile carriers, using proprietary protocols and has minimal security risks due to restricted user access. Potentially, intersignaling can be exploited from the IP side to disrupt the services provided on the circuit-switched side. This study demonstrates the vulnerabilities of SS7 messages to cyber-attacks while being trans- ported over IP networks and proposes some solutions based on securing both the IP transport and SCTP layers of the SIGTRAN protocol stack