The need of standardization and the potential role of voluntary approaches: Issues and trends in Italian GCHP market

Despite the lack of specific incentives, Ground Coupled Heat Pumps (GCHP) installations are booming in Italy both in private and public sectors of the market. Such rapid growth entails an increasing concern for environmental and technical performances since no comprehensive regulation and reliable standards exist yet. By means of an investigation of sectoral opinion leaders and SWOT-based technique for building scenarios, this paper discusses potential schemes for balancing mandatory and voluntary requirements. The analysis suggests that standardization and voluntary schemes are perceived as effective tools to encourage the greening of Italian GCHP-SMEs in short-run while laying the foundations for evolving sustainable policies in the longer run. A potential scheme that has been simulated by reflecting the supply-side orientations of the market and that involves of process and product standards is discussed.

Ultra wideband: applications, technology and future perspectives

Ultra Wide Band (UWB) wireless communications offers a radically different approach to wireless communication compared to conventional narrow band systems. Global interest in the technology is huge. This paper reports on the state of the art of UWB wireless technology and highlights key application areas, technological challenges, higher layer protocol issues, spectrum operating zones and future drivers. The majority of the discussion focuses on the state of the art of UWB technology as it is today and in the near future

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Middleware architectures for the smart grid: A survey on the state-of-the-art, taxonomy and main open issues

The integration of small-scale renewable energy sources in the smart grid depends on several challenges that must be overcome. One of them is the presence of devices with very different characteristics present in the grid or how they can interact among them in terms of interoperability and data sharing. While this issue is usually solved by implementing a middleware layer among the available pieces of equipment in order to hide any hardware heterogeneity and offer the application layer a collection of homogenous resources to access lower levels, the variety and differences among them make the definition of what is needed in each particular case challenging. This paper offers a description of the most prominent middleware architectures for the smart grid and assesses the functionalities they have, considering the performance and features expected from them in the context of this application domain

A survey of handover algorithms in DVB-H

Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds (DVB-H) is a standard for broadcasting IP Datacast (IPDC) services to mobile handheld terminals. Based on the DVB-T standard, DVB-H adds new features such as time slicing, MPE-FEC, in-depth interleavers, mandatory cell id identifier, optional 4K-modulation mode and the use of 5 MHz bandwidth in addition to the usually used 6, 7, or 8 MHz raster. IPDC over DVB-H is proposed for ETSI to complement the DVB-H standard by combining IPDC and DVB-H in an end-to-end system. Handover in such unidirectional broadcasting networks is a novel issue. In the last few years since the birth of DVB-H technology, great attention has been given to the performance analysis of DVB-H mobile terminals. Handover is one of the main research topics for DVB-H in mobile scenarios. Better reception quality and greater power efficiency are considered to be the main targets of handover research for DVB-H. New algorithms for different handover stages in DVB-H have been the subject of recent research and are currently being studied. Further novel algorithms need to be designed to improve the mobile reception quality. This article provides a comprehensive survey of the handover algorithms in DVB-H. A systematic evaluation and categorization approach is proposed based on the problems the algorithms solve and the handover stages being focused on. Criteria are proposed and analyzed to facilitate designing better handover algorithms for DVB-H that have been identified from the research conducted by the author

WAPI: A Chinese Attempt to Establish Wireless Standards and the International Coalition that Resisted

This case narrates a standard dispute between competing industrial coalitions in China and the U.S., both having an active involvement of the national governments. Specifically, the Chinese government organized the R&D of wireless local area network (WLAN) standards and tried to use them to replace the incumbent technologies controlled by international giants in the information industry. However, due to the strong objection of the foreign stakeholders in the WLAN market, China’s initiative eventually failed. While there is ample knowledge available regarding successful experiences with technology standardization in the developed world, this case is unique because it deals with the unsuccessful experience of China. This case provides rare insights into the challenges that developing countries will meet in adopting indigenous technologies. It is useful for a discussion of how a country should organize its standardization activities

The 3G Transition: Changes in the U.S. Wireless Industry

We argue that the transition of the wireless industry from 2G to 3G is more than a simple technology upgrade. The industry’s service profile will move far beyond telephony and services will convergence with the computing and content sectors. This will bring many more players into this already huge industry. Thus the transition to 3G is a major economic transformation and requires a major reconfiguration of the value-network. Technical standards will be essential to the effective operation of wireless systems and, perhaps more importantly, because they will play a critical role in the future coordination of value-networks. During the current transition the standardization process has changed considerably – reflecting changes in the new value-network configurations. While the number of air-interface standards have been reduced to only two the overall number of standards bodies has increased by almost an order of magnitude to support the growing industry’s coordination requirements at other critical interfaces. At the same time the importance of the traditional standards development organization has diminished and industry consortia have taken over responsibility for most of the standardization workload. There is a general consensus that the major standardization battlegrounds, that will influence how the industry gets reorganized, have moved up the stack to the service enabler level. In addition there are indications that the manufacture of handsets and other mobile communications terminals is transitioning to a more horizontal structure

The history of WiMAX: a complete survey of the evolution in certification and standarization for IEEE 802.16 and WiMAX

Most researchers are familiar with the technical features of WiMAX technology but the evolution that WiMAX went through, in terms of standardization and certification, is missing and unknown to most people. Knowledge of this historical process would however aid to understand how WiMAX has become the widespread technology that it is today. Furthermore, it would give insight in the steps to undertake for anyone aiming at introducing a new wireless technology on a worldwide scale. Therefore, this article presents a survey on all relevant activities that took place within three important organizations: the 802.16 Working Group of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) for technology development and standardization, the WiMAX Forum for product certification and the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) for international recognition. An elaborated and comprehensive overview of all those activities is given, which reveals the importance of the willingness to innovate and to continuously incorporate new ideas in the IEEE standardization process and the importance of the WiMAX Forum certification label granting process to ensure interoperability. We also emphasize the steps that were taken in cooperating with the ITU to improve the international esteem of the technology. Finally, a WiMAX trend analysis is made. We showed how industry interest has fluctuated over time and quantified the evolution in WiMAX product certification and deployments. It is shown that most interest went to the 2.5 GHz and 3.5GHz frequencies, that most deployments are in geographic regions with a lot of developing countries and that the highest people coverage is achieved in Asia Pacific. This elaborated description of all standardization and certification activities, from the very start up to now, will make the reader comprehend how past and future steps are taken in the development process of new WiMAX features

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