8,625 research outputs found
TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2009
TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month
M-health review: joining up healthcare in a wireless world
In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver health and social care. This trend is bound to continue as providers (whether public or private) strive to deliver better care to more people under conditions of severe budgetary constraint
Optimized mobile thin clients through a MPEG-4 BiFS semantic remote display framework
According to the thin client computing principle, the user interface is physically separated from the application logic. In practice only a viewer component is executed on the client device, rendering the display updates received from the distant application server and capturing the user interaction. Existing remote display frameworks are not optimized to encode the complex scenes of modern applications, which are composed of objects with very diverse graphical characteristics. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose to transfer to the client, in addition to the binary encoded objects, semantic information about the characteristics of each object. Through this semantic knowledge, the client is enabled to react autonomously on user input and does not have to wait for the display update from the server. Resulting in a reduction of the interaction latency and a mitigation of the bursty remote display traffic pattern, the presented framework is of particular interest in a wireless context, where the bandwidth is limited and expensive. In this paper, we describe a generic architecture of a semantic remote display framework. Furthermore, we have developed a prototype using the MPEG-4 Binary Format for Scenes to convey the semantic information to the client. We experimentally compare the bandwidth consumption of MPEG-4 BiFS with existing, non-semantic, remote display frameworks. In a text editing scenario, we realize an average reduction of 23% of the data peaks that are observed in remote display protocol traffic
Delivery of broadband services to SubSaharan Africa via Nigerian communications satellite
Africa is the least wired continent in the world in terms of robust telecommunications infrastructure and systems to cater for its more than one billion people. African nations are mostly still in the early stages of Information Communications Technology (ICT) development as verified by the relatively low ICT Development Index (IDI) values of all countries in the African region. In developing nations, mobile broadband subscriptions and penetration between 2000-2009 was increasingly more popular than fixed broadband subscriptions. To achieve the goal of universal access, with rapid implementation of ICT infrastructure to complement the sparsely distributed terrestrial networks in the hinterlands and leveraging the adequate submarine cables along the African coastline, African nations and their stakeholders are promoting and implementing Communication Satellite systems, particularly in Nigeria, to help bridge the digital hiatus. This paper examines the effectiveness of communication satellites in delivering broadband-based services
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Multimedia delivery in the future internet
The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio
and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks,
like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white
paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked
challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet.
Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted
with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning
media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace
of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more
than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so
regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected
to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising
to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged
that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new)
multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized
way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety.
In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe
network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as
community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of
interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and
innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/
media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content
combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P
networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to
contribute towards such a vision.
Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6)
and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily
contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way
ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms
Service Platform for Converged Interactive Broadband Broadcast and Cellular Wireless
A converged broadcast and telecommunication
service platform is presented that is able to create, deliver, and
manage interactive, multimedia content and services for consumption
on three different terminal types. The motivations of
service providers for designing converged interactive multimedia
services, which are crafted for their individual requirements, are
investigated. The overall design of the system is presented with
particular emphasis placed on the operational features of each
of the sub-systems, the flows of media and metadata through the
sub-systems and the formats and protocols required for inter-communication
between them. The key features of tools required for
creating converged interactive multimedia content for a range of
different end-user terminal types are examined. Finally possible
enhancements to this system are discussed. This study is of particular
interest to those organizations currently conducting trials
and commercial launches of DVB-H services because it provides
them with an insight of the various additional functions required
in the service provisioning platforms to provide fully interactive
services to a range of different mobile terminal types
TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010
TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month
Performance evaluation of cooperation strategies for m-health services and applications
Health telematics are becoming a major improvement for patients’ lives, especially for
disabled, elderly, and chronically ill people. Information and communication technologies have
rapidly grown along with the mobile Internet concept of anywhere and anytime connection.
In this context, Mobile Health (m-Health) proposes healthcare services delivering, overcoming
geographical, temporal and even organizational barriers. Pervasive and m-Health services aim
to respond several emerging problems in health services, including the increasing number of
chronic diseases related to lifestyle, high costs in existing national health services, the need
to empower patients and families to self-care and manage their own healthcare, and the need
to provide direct access to health services, regardless the time and place. Mobile Health (m-
Health) systems include the use of mobile devices and applications that interact with patients
and caretakers. However, mobile devices have several constraints (such as, processor, energy,
and storage resource limitations), affecting the quality of service and user experience. Architectures
based on mobile devices and wireless communications presents several challenged issues
and constraints, such as, battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections,
noises, limited bandwidths, and network delays. In this sense, cooperation-based
approaches are presented as a solution to solve such limitations, focusing on increasing network
connectivity, communication rates, and reliability. Cooperation is an important research topic
that has been growing in recent years. With the advent of wireless networks, several recent
studies present cooperation mechanisms and algorithms as a solution to improve wireless networks
performance. In the absence of a stable network infrastructure, mobile nodes cooperate
with each other performing all networking functionalities. For example, it can support intermediate
nodes forwarding packets between two distant nodes.
This Thesis proposes a novel cooperation strategy for m-Health services and applications.
This reputation-based scheme uses a Web-service to handle all the nodes reputation and networking
permissions. Its main goal is to provide Internet services to mobile devices without
network connectivity through cooperation with neighbor devices. Therefore resolving the above
mentioned network problems and resulting in a major improvement for m-Health network architectures
performances. A performance evaluation of this proposal through a real network
scenario demonstrating and validating this cooperative scheme using a real m-Health application
is presented. A cryptography solution for m-Health applications under cooperative environments,
called DE4MHA, is also proposed and evaluated using the same real network scenario and
the same m-Health application. Finally, this work proposes, a generalized cooperative application
framework, called MobiCoop, that extends the incentive-based cooperative scheme for
m-Health applications for all mobile applications. Its performance evaluation is also presented
through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating MobiCoop using different mobile
applications
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