The challenges facing road-side ‘m-Preneurs’ in leap-frogging the constraints of ICTs in DCs: A Nigerian case study

Studies have shown that the number of mobile telecommunications operators in Nigeria has been on the increase since the first Global System of Mobile Telecommunications (GSM) licence was granted to MTN (Mobile Telecommunications Network) in 2001. With the increase in mobile telecommunications operators also has come an unprecedented increase in subscriptions. According to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) data, between 2001 and 2006 for instance, mobile telephone subscribers in Nigeria jumped from 266, 461 to 32.3 million indicating an increase of 12, 030.18 %

Service innovation and the role of science, technology, engineering and mathematics: ten challenges for industry, academia and government

"White paper, Centre for Service Research

Quasi-omniscient networks: scenarios on context capturing and new services through wireless sensor networks

This paper addresses future scenarios for the telecommunications field, addressing the impact of three important research trends in computer networks: Context, Sensors and Wireless Networks. The proposed scenarios clearly highlight the possible synergies between the defined areas, and describe the role of Users and Network Operators in order to achieve the described goals. The potential danger of an over-encompassing network is identified, with a brief discussion on the challenges associated to the implementation of such a knowledge-aware communications network. The paper finalizes presenting a classification on the typical scenarios to be expected, and highlighting the associated challenges. It also presents a proposal on a scalable network infrastructure for Context processing

Individual Tariffs for Mobile Communication Services

This paper introduces a conceptual framework and a computational model for individual tariffs for mobile communication services. The purpose is to provide guidance for implementation by communication service suppliers or user groups alike. The paper first examines the sociological and economic incentives for personalized services and individual tariffs. Then it introduces a framework for individual tariffs which is centered on user and supplier behaviours. The user, instead of being fully rational, has "bounded rationality" and his behaviours are subject to economic constraints and influenced by social needs. The supplier can belong to different types of entities such as firms and communities; each has his own goals which lead to different behaviors. Individual tariffs are decided through interactions between the user and the supplier and can be analyzed in a structured way using game theory. A numerical case in mobile music training is developed to illustrate the concepts.risks;mobile communication services;Individual tariffs;computational games

Changing Trends in Telecommunications Industry

The mobile telecommunication industry is one of the fastest growing and continually changing markets in the world today. The greatest achievement of wireless technology is that it has made communications possible in the most remote of places at a much lower cost and at a much lesser time to deploy. The US market is largely considered an early adopter market in the wireless technology domain. A wide variety of products are designed in US and the service providers have the opportunity of bringing these devices first to customers locally. On the voice side the US market is seen as a fairly stable and saturated market. With the sudden proliferation of data services and aligned equipment, new markets in the same geography have opened up and have created a huge opportunity to restructure the way wireless services are sold to customers. The US model has traditionally been a model where the service provider sells the equipments needed for the service on a contract basis. There are some obvious advantages and some disadvantages with this model. Businesses may assume they are using the right method to deliver services to attract and retain their customers, but in reality they may miss the part of understanding the user needs. The industries involved in this study include the wireless service provider industry, the equipment manufacture industry and the wireless chipset industry. Through this study it was found that customers are happy to stay with the current model of buying services on a monthly plan from their service provider but are not happy with the contract they need to sign during activation. It was also found that there is a need to look more closely at the current wireless service provider and handset manufacturer relationship and in some cases decouple the closed structure it is in place today. The consumers want more freedom in terms of the devices and services they want to buy. The wireless chipset manufacturers have not much of a change in role they play today. They would work almost the same way they function today to deliver the state-of-the-art chipsets that go into handsets irrespective of the changes in the relationship between the service provider and equipment manufacturer. That said they need to closely understand the changing dynamics in the product portfolio and create systems with multiple technologies that would work more seamless together. This project has helped understand various aspects of the mobile telecommunications market better from a consumer perspective

UAV-Empowered Disaster-Resilient Edge Architecture for Delay-Sensitive Communication

The fifth-generation (5G) communication systems will enable enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable low latency, and massive connectivity services. The broadband and low-latency services are indispensable to public safety (PS) communication during natural or man-made disasters. Recently, the third generation partnership project long term evolution (3GPPLTE) has emerged as a promising candidate to enable broadband PS communications. In this article, first we present six major PS-LTE enabling services and the current status of PS-LTE in 3GPP releases. Then, we discuss the spectrum bands allocated for PS-LTE in major countries by international telecommunication union (ITU). Finally, we propose a disaster resilient three-layered architecture for PS-LTE (DR-PSLTE). This architecture consists of a software-defined network (SDN) layer to provide centralized control, an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) cloudlet layer to facilitate edge computing or to enable emergency communication link, and a radio access layer. The proposed architecture is flexible and combines the benefits of SDNs and edge computing to efficiently meet the delay requirements of various PS-LTE services. Numerical results verified that under the proposed DR-PSLTE architecture, delay is reduced by 20% as compared with the conventional centralized computing architecture.Comment: 9,